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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
What If We Stopped Focusing On Sales, What If We Focused On Selling?
Some readers will suggest I’m playing with words, I don’t mean to be. I’m playing with your mindset, hoping you consider a different perspective. We use a lot of words to talk about the function of sales. We focus on the organization, the various jobs and things that exist within the sales function. When we focus on sales, we focus on that function and how it works most effectively and efficiently. But, focusing on sales restricts us from a complete view of selling–how we engage our customers most effectively, when they are buying….. To understand selling, let’s focus on buying. […]
Making A Difference, Pursuing Your Passions
As we come to the end of 2020, I want to reflect a moment. Yes, I know we are all supposed to write about New Year’s Resolutions—99% of which will be abandoned before the end of January. But given this year, I want to focus on something else. When I started this blog, about 13 years ago, I chose to call it “Making A Difference.” My hope has been to make a difference in the lives of people reading these posts. To have them think differently, to help them find new ways to achieve their goals, to grow and learn. […]
“For The Loss Of A Horseshoe….”
There’s the old fable, “For the loss of a horseshoe, a Kingdom was lost.” The story goes that the King’s horse lost a horseshoe. As a result, the King was not able to lead his troops into battle, and because of that they lost the battle, then the war, then the Kingdom. We sell horseshoes. Regardless of what we sell, we basically sell horseshoes. What most of us sell is not the “difference maker” to our customer’s abilities to achieve their strategic goals. Very few of us can say, “We can impact your stock price by this amount…..” or “We […]
Right-Level Selling
We’ve always been taught to “call high.” We are supposed to reach “The Decision-maker,” perhaps leveraging our influencers. But complex B2B buying has changed profoundly, “The Decision-maker” has become a buying/decision-making group. The number of people, directly and indirectly, involved in the buying process has grown. Often, corralling them, and helping them navigate their buying process makes herding cats seem trivial. But we still have some mistaken notions about “calling high.” Here are some thoughts: What is the vested interest of the people involved in the buying process? Sometimes, while we think what we sell is important, it may not […]
Banish These Words, “For Now…”
Before continuing, I have to give credit to this phrase and important concept to Brent Adamson. Brent and I were having one of our frequent conversations about the future of buying/selling. We were discussing the pandemic and it’s impact on buyers and sellers. We’ve seen our worlds turned upside down. We and our customers are re-inventing our business. We, mutually, are discovering new ways of buying and new ways to engage our customers. As I speak with many business people, they reflect, then say, “It’s fascinating, this has caused us to rethink what we are doing. And we are discovering […]
Sales Role Specialization
A couple of people I deeply respect have written outstanding pieces arguing that we have take sales role specialization too far. Amy Volas wrote, “Is Sales Over-segmented,” Bob Apollo wrote, “Has role specialisation in B2B selling gone too far?” (There Bob goes with his “English” spelling.) Both articles are outstanding. I thought I’d pile on, perhaps reinforcing their points. Much of their discussion has to do with the current mechanization of selling that’s become popular in the SDR/AE approach to selling. This assembly line process starts with a widget (let’s call them customers), being passed from person to person down […]