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Making A Difference – Thoughts, Observations and Opinions
This is Dave Brock’s Blog.
It offers my views on a variety of business, sales, marketing, and leadership topic. My goal is to make a difference for you, the reader, in both your professional and personal lives.
Latest Posts
“Sensemaking” Is Not Just For Our Customers
Brent Adamson wrote an outstanding HBR article on “Sensemaking For Sales.” It’s an important concept, focused on helping our customers make higher quality decisions, with greater confidence. One of the most important things Brent discusses is how customers tend to cope when faced so much high quality information. Customers tend to fall back on what they already know and have confidence in. These cognitive biases tend to drive “belief perseverance,” and “status quo bias,” doing what we’ve always done. Brent, also, highlights three styles that sales people adopt to help their customers. The “giving” approach is one where the sales […]
DIGITAL transformation Or digital TRANSFORMATION
You can’t look at anything in sales, marketing, even business without encountering the discussions of Digital Transformation. What’s interesting is where people put the emphasis. Often, particularly with vendors, the emphasis is on the DIGITAL, that is the technology. Technology is enabling us to do things we have never been able to do. It’s just not making us more efficient or increasing the volume/velocity of what we do. It can help us discover things that we might never have seen before, or would have taken years to understand. It enables us to make decisions, change, do new things that drive […]
What Got Us Here Won’t Get Us To Where We Need To Be
Part of what enables us to achieve is our experience and past success. Stated differently, we tend to repeat the things we have always done because they worked for us in the past. This is both a good and bad news principle. The good news side of it is that understanding what works, systematizing it, repeating and scaling it enables us to continue to perform and grow. Leveraging our past experience, systematizing it, doing it repeatedly, becomes second nature. We don’t have to think about it, we have developed the habits and it becomes easy. It would be foolish to […]
Making “The Number” May Not Be Enough!
I was meeting with the executive team of an organization. They were proud, as they should have been, of their performance. For the past 5 years, they had been consistently hitting their revenue goal. It hadn’t been easy, but each year, they somehow managed to pull it out and hit their goal. After congratulating them on their performance, I asked, “Why do you want to talk to me?” Even over Zoom, I could see them squirming in their seats. Finally the CRO said, “I think we could do better……” We had a fascinating discussion, it turned out they were significantly […]
Sales And Marketing Alignment Or Integration?
I wonder if we need to rethink our concepts of sales and marketing and how we organize to provide those functions within the organization. Looking back, historically, it has made sense to separate the functions. Marketing was primarily focused on creating visibility and awareness. It typically dealt with markets and industries, not customers. It’s job was to make masses of people and organizations aware of our companies and our products. It created high level interest that would attract people to want to learn more. Typically, it dealt with things like PR, advertising, events, and other methods of driving awareness. It […]
Being A Buyer Is A Foreign Concept To Customers
As sales people, we know what our job is. We have to generate revenue through finding customers who have a need for our solution. We do the same things day after day. We prospect to find new opportunities, we work on deals, helping the customer move through their buying process and selecting a solution. We are constantly working with people in various stages of their buying journey, preparing for meetings, educating customers, conducting demonstrations, doing research, developing and presenting proposals. While each situation is different, in general, the activities we do are similar. We even have processes that help guide […]