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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
Rethinking Sales Enablement
Billions are invested in sales enablement programs, worldwide. We have tools, training, processes, programs, systems. To be honest, I have a “love/hate” relationship with sales enablement (not the people in sales enablement.) I think it’s a critical function to support and enable sales people. But too often, we see massive failures. It may be failures on the part of sales managers and sales people, failing to implement the programs sales enablement people develop. It may be the failure of sales enablers, implementing the wrong things in the wrong way. It’s probably more likely a combination of failures on both the […]
Being Helpful To Customers
Increasingly, we are learning the key to our success, as sales people, is to be helpful. Too often, however, what we intend as “help,” actually isn’t helpful. Recently, I was sitting in on a call (it’s easy to do that on Zoom, these days). The customer was looking at an IT solution. It was a very complex tool, the customer had some understanding of the area–but not nearly the depth of knowledge the sales team from my client. The call started well. The team discussed what the customer was trying to achieve, why they needed to implement a new approach, […]
Can You Actually Convince Your Customers?
There are a lot of sales people focused on convincing their customers. Somehow they believe they can make their customers buy, make them choose them, if only they do the right job in convincing the customer. All sorts of techniques are used to try to convince the customer. It may be overwhelming them with information and data supporting what you are trying to convince people to do. We will provide references, case studies to support our arguments. We will reinforce that with incentives or discounts. We may leverage our relationships. Sometimes we think we have convinced people, when all we […]
Selling Is A Human Process, Part 2
A few days ago, I wrote, Selling Is A Human Process. It generated a lot of discussion, much of it revolving around the theme of, “What keeps us from doing this? What keeps us from engaging customers in a human way?” I don’t know that I have the answers to those questions, but I have some thoughts. We know that selling is about relationships. But what does that mean? It’s not about likeability, which may be part of building a relationship. But it’s far deeper than that. It’s about caring. Caring for each person we engage. It’s about respect, whether […]
Meeting Complexity With Complexity
We are surrounded by complexity–in our business, in our communities, in our lives. Complexity can be, by it’s nature, overwhelming. Ironically, too often our approach to dealing with complex situations is to make them more complex. We do this, because we don’t understand what we face or what we may be trying to do. We do this, because we’ve never experienced the situation before. We do this because we worry about risk. We do this because we worry about what we don’t know. We do this because we may be frightened. We do this because we don’t know any other […]
Selling Is A Human Process
In the past 10 years, we’ve done everything we can to take the “human” out of complex B2B selling. We’ve mechanized the process, focusing on our efficiency and less on the customer buying experience. We inflict mass, meaningless outreaches across increasing numbers of channels and increasing volumes of suspects. Sales growth has become a “predictable” math equation. “If it takes so many emails/dials to produce a conversation, to double the conversations, we simply double the emails/dials.” Rather than focusing on listening, learning, and sharing; we have tools focused on conversational intelligence–but they can’t conduct high impact conversations. We focus on […]