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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
Product Versus Solution Selling
It must be that time of year, but recently I’ve gotten a number of queries from thoughtful executives: “Dave, we need to transform the way we sell from product to solution selling……” That statement is always a little confusing to me, naturally I ask, “What does that mean and why do you want to change?” Here the conversation usually gets a little fuzzy. Usually the response is “Customers want solutions not products….” My response is, “I get that, but what do you mean when you want to move from product selling to solutions?” Alternatively, I might ask, “What solutions do […]
Do Customers Really Have A Buying Process?
It’s become common “wisdom” that we have to align align our sales process with our customers’ buying processes. I write about it constantly, as well as hundreds of others. It’s become almost a mantra in all the literature and training programs. I suppose it’s easy to want to believe customers have buying processes. Certainly, procurement has processes they follow in their buying activities. There is a certain structure/process to the RFP/RFQ process. Things we buy every day have a certain routine-ness to them, to the point they become transactional, which may be a process. But if we look at complex […]
Clinging To The Past
Both we and our customers struggle with change. Think, for a moment, how many times you may have said, or you’ve heard within your organization or from your customers: “But we’ve always done things this way…….” “If it ain’t broke……” We live in business and personal worlds characterized by turbulence and change. Clinging to the things we’ve always done forces us to stay stuck in the past. Ironically, we are working harder than ever before. We are putting in longer hours, we are constantly increasing volumes–more calls, more prospecting, more deals, bigger pipelines. We are doing more of what we’ve […]
Proving Math Works, Flawed Coaching Arguments
There seem to be no end of articles on who and how managers should invest their time in coaching. Recently, I read another, with lots of people piling on with their opinions and proving it with numbers. As is usual, most of these discussions that prove little more than math works. Many of the arguments go something like this: “Assume an A player is doing $250K, a B player is doing $150K. If we raise the performance of each by 10%, clearly the incremental $25K from the A player far exceeds the increment of $15K from the B player.” With […]
How Many Times Are We Going To Have This Discussion?
Sales is an interesting function, we seem to be caught in a perpetual “deja vu” or one of those scenes in the movie “Ground Hog Day.” Having been involved in professional selling for most of my career, I’m at the point where I hear the same conversations all over again, and again, and again. You know the conversations I’m talking about: We have to stop pitching, start listening….. We have to be customer focused…… We have to be account focused….. We have to create value and provide insight…… We have to focus on our customers’ problems and provide insights…. We […]
New Ideas Don’t Have To Be “New”
We constantly struggle with innovation and insight, whether it’s for our own organization or our work with customers. To be honest, I think we make innovation and insight far too complicated. I don’t know how many “innovation” session I see organizations conducting. Usually, it’s a group of people sitting in a circle. Perhaps they are surrounded by white boards, there are pads of different color “Post-Its.” There may be a facilitator taking the group through a number of “mind-freeing” exercises. Inevitably, they struggle. The groups stare at each other, toss out some ideas, but struggle with really new ideas. Likewise, […]