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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
How Do You Want To Be Sold?
Not long ago, I was on a Zoom call with a bunch of CROs. At some point in the conversation, someone started talking about all the inept prospecting being inflicted on her. She complained about the emails, the constant junk calls on her mobile, the inept and inappropriate LinkedIn and other social media outreaches. Everyone piled on, sharing their experiences and their “favorite” bad prospecting ploys (Found a lot of great materials for Hank Barnes’ #FridayFails.) All the things you would expect came up in the conversation, absence of targeting, lack of understanding about the company and the individual, poor […]
It’s Prediction Season Again
It’s that time of year where it’s fashionable to make predictions about the big issues for sales, marketing, and customer experience. Various experts and “gurus” discuss their view of the “big issues,” we face and changes for the coming year. Many are very good, some are intended to stir up controversy, some are promoting the offerings of the guru. I have mixed feelings when people ask me for my predictions. Most of the time I feel like Bill Murray in Ground Hog Day. It seems every year we go through the same thing–perhaps updated with new buzzwords or with a […]
Is The Future Of Selling PLG?
I read a lot of commentary from “experts” about PLG–Product Led Growth. Apparently, much of the “future of sales,” will be driven by PLG initiatives. I get why sales people revel in this. It leaves all the heavy lifting of “buying” to the customer. PLG is great for sales. We don’t waste our time inciting people to change, to consider doing things differently. We don’t have to invest in understanding the customers’ businesses and challenges. We don’t have to help them determine their needs and priorities. We don’t have to help them organize themselves to buy and define their buying […]
On Giving Thanks
In the US, we have this custom of reserving one day each year of giving Thanks. It’s a time to get together with family and friends, over indulge in eating and watching football (The American version). And we do take moments to reflect and give thanks. There is a lot that we, and specifically me, can be thankful about at this time of year. A year ago, we reflected on a year that most of us have never encountered–health, economy, social and other challenges causing us to rethink everything we believe in and do. A year later, we face many […]
Buzzword Bingo, Sales Edition
Some years ago, partly to overcome the boredom of PowerPoint pitches, Buzzword Bingo was developed. Whether at a conference listening to speakers wax on about how fantastic their technology and companies were, investor meetings, sales pitches, people played this game. It came from the endless buzzwords that presenters injected into their presentations to feign credibility. We would score certain types of words differently. For example things like “cloud, edge computing, data lakes, digital transformation, resilience, scalable, gamify” would get certain scores-with heavy multipliers based on the number of times they were mentioned in one chart or presentation. Then there were […]
Our Selling Process Can Help Our Customers Buy
From my earliest days as a salesperson, I’ve been taught the “sales process,” and have tried to execute that process as effectively as possible. It’s always a structured approach to engaging the customer, working with them to make a buying decision. The process has always reminded me of critical things I should be considering, to maximize my impact in working with the customer. The sales process has always had multiple stages, stages that focused me on finding new opportunities, qualifying them based on a customer commitment to take action, understanding what the customer wanted to do, other things that may […]