Dave Brock
Dave Brock
Dave has spent his career developing high performance organizations. He worked in sales, marketing, and executive management capacities with IBM, Tektronix and Keithley Instruments. His consulting clients include companies in the semiconductor, aerospace, electronics, consumer products, computer, telecommunications, retailing, internet, software, professional and financial services industries.
“Procurement Needs To Bring More To The Table Than Discounts”
I can hear the cheers already, every sales professional reading this will probably forward it to their favorite–or not so favorite procurement professional. I took...
Is Added Value Really Value Add?
Added Value has always been an important idea in at least my sales career. It was always drilled into me to articulate and claim...
Do You Really Know Your Sweet Spot?
Maximizing sales success, market penetration, and growth requires knowing your "sweet spot." The sweet spot is that set of customers having problems that...
What Do Reductionism And Machine Design Have To Do With Selling And Buying?
It's probably hard to conceive of a sales guy, like me, using a multi-syllabic word like Reductionism. But my friend Charlie Green wrote...
Insight Is Not The End, It’s The Beginning
There has been so much good discussion on Insight over the past few years. Everyone tends to have a different point of view–or twists...
Knowing More Than Our Customers
I get disturbed by much of the hyperbole around Insight Selling and Teaching Our Customers. We are supposed to know more than our...
The Essence Of Selling
A thoughtful commenter recently started a comment with, "The essence of selling……….." I didn't completely agree with the comment, but it got me to thinking...
What Is Your Customer Trying To Achieve?
Too often, both we and our customers get so caught up in activities that we lose sight of what we are trying to achieve. A...
Shifting Our Perspectives
Sometimes I talk to frustrated sales people, "All you say is we've got to give the customers Insight, we have to focus on solving...
“Problem Talking” Is Not “Problem Solving”
As sales people, we build the greatest value for our customers by helping them solve problems. Stated differently, customers value sales people who...
Knowing Where Our Customers Live
Too often, our problem as professional sales or marketing people is that we think like professional sales and marketing people. "Duh, Dave….thanks for...
The Helpful Sales Person
We want to establish relationships with our customers. We want to be helpful. But sometimes being helpful isn't helpful–to us in achieving...
Can Insight Become Commoditized?
Forgive me for thinking out loud. Insight–selling with Insight is what everyone is talking about these days. It's an interesting bandwagon, there's...
Creating Discomfort
My friend, Tim Ohai, wrote a brilliant guest post today: Cooperation Is For Losers. While the entire post is great, one sentence...
Experiencing What Our Customers Experience
Too often, there's a huge disconnect between our organizations and our customers. Our customers and prospects are frustrated with us and we don't...
Laziness Takes Too Much Time And Effort!
In several posts recently, I've been railing against lazy, unimaginative selling. I have to confess, I have no tolerance for laziness, and tend...
Building A Better “Social Business”
Recently, I had the privilege of speaking with Ed Abrams, Vice President of Marketing for IBM's Small and Mid Sized Business Segment. Ed...
Customer Decisionmaking, Like Herding Cats
I'm the proud "father" of Sammy and Harley—that's them in the picture. It took my wife and I 30 minutes to get them...
How Will The Customer Pay For It?
I've written before about how many opportunities we inappropriately disqualify because the customer doesn't have the budget. If you'd like a refresher, look...
Turning Your Value Prop Upside Down
Tweet We're all proud of our value propositions! We feature them in our web sites, we're trained to brag about them to our customers....