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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
Dear Outlook And Gmail Developers……
Dear Outlook, Gmail, and developers of all email systems. I have a feature request. Actually, it’s a feature removal request. I think it will improve the productivity of all email users, and how they value your tools. Please remove the “Reply All,” feature. I’m just about to join a meeting of more than 300 people. But many of them have have lost the meeting link. Rather than addressing their requests to the meeting organizer, they are using “Reply All…..” My inbox has exploded with requests. This is perhaps the most egregious example I’ve encountered. But I experience this everyday with […]
Are You Confident Enough In Your Value Not To Discount?
Discounting has reached Pandemic levels. It used to be something we used as a last resort, and only under extreme duress. Today, responding to a prospecting call earns a discount. Proposals come with a price and then either an automatically applied discount, or hints at a discount. Something like, “Buy by the end of the month and I can discount 15%!” Forget the adverse revenue impact. Discounting is a demonstration in our own lack of confidence in the value we create with our solutions! Stated differently, it’s like shouting to our customers, “We don’t believe in our solutions strongly enough […]
The Power Of Role Plays
You are probably shocked. “Dave doesn’t write about this stuff, he usually writes about much bigger issues, WTF is happening to him?” Actually, conducting role plays has been a powerful tool that we use both in our consulting, training, and coaching. I don’t think we use them enough. There are a lot of tools that offer alternatives to role plays. We can record calls, they will be analyzed, and provide coaching to the individual, “You asked 6 questions, you should have asked 4, you didn’t swear enough….” (Yes, know my cynicism about some of the advice given by the conversational […]
“One Size Fits All…..”
Each of our customers’ strategies, goals, priorities, culture, and values are different. The specific challenges and problems they face are different. That’s at an enterprise level. Then when we look within those organizations, the goals, priorities, challenges, problems of each individual differ. Yet we inflict the same standard “stuff” on all of them. We treat each as though they are identical–same strategies, goals, priorities, culture, values, problems, challenges. We take them through the same standard “handling” as we engage them and move them through our selling process (forget they have their own buying processes and they struggle with it.). We […]
Buying/Selling Vs Buyer/Seller
Recently, I’ve been trying to shift my own thinking and vocabulary about buying and selling. Several people have asked me about it. I thought I’d spend a little time on it. I believe shifting our vocabularies from Buyer/Seller to Buying/Selling is much more than wordsmithing. It forces us to change our perspectives about how our customers buy—or drive their problem solving/change initiatives. And it forces us to rethink how we engage these customers in selling. The problem with the terms Buyers/Sellers is we focus on certain roles or people of our and our customer’s organizations. By doing this, we potentially […]
Making Sense Of Sensemaking
I was speaking to a great group on Sensemaking today (Thanks Reggie and Tom for the invitation). One of the participants asked a great question, “How do we know/measure if we are making sense with the customer? It’s a fascinating question. I’d love your thoughts, but here are some ideas I’ve come up with: I think it’s pretty easy to measure after the decision has been made. We can measure decision regret. We can assess, “Are they accomplishing what they had hoped to accomplish?” But how do we measure sensemaking during the buying journey? How do we know that we […]