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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
Should Sellers Do Their Own Research?
I see a lot of discussions about “forcing sellers to waste selling time by doing their own research.” Increasingly, I see people recommending outsourcing this research, freeing the time up to make more calls. Clearly, too many sales people don’t know how to do research, as a result, they waste a lot of time. There are many that don’t leverage the tools effectively. So there is a lot of room for improvement in the research that sales people do. But I would never take the research responsibility away from the sellers, whether they are SDRs, AEs, or some other role. […]
“You Have To Make Your Number With Only 50% Of Your Current Prospecting Calls!”
We know the incessant mantra around maximizing the number of calls we make every day. We know, almost daily, we have to make more calls than we did yesterday, last week, last quarter. Fewer customers are responding, so to make our numbers, we have to make more calls. What if we tried something different? Let’s try a thought experiment, imagine this challenge, “You have to make your number, but we’re only going to allow you to make 50% of the calls you are currently making!” Yeah, I know you are thinking, “Dave, you are crazy, we have to make more […]
Squandered Opportunity
Selling is tough! I can’t imagine more of an understatement. Despite all the tricks, techniques, and gimmicks the guru’s foist on us, selling is never easy. We are trying to incite our customers to change, we are trying to help them navigate a very difficult process, we are trying to help them make a decision–for which there may be a good amount of personal risk. Overlay on this, the fact that customers are averse to dealing with sales people. Every time I look at the research it changes, a few years ago, 43% of customers prefer a rep-free buying experience. […]
Who’s Your Competition?
We, sometimes, assess ourselves against the wrong competitors. We think our competitors are those organizations providing similar products and services. We analyze their products/offerings, we look at their market strategies, how they position themselves with customers, how they create value. In developing our competitive strategies, we take these analyses, figuring out how we can be perceived as better than them. Perhaps some new features and functions are added to our products. We copy some of the good elements of their strategies, or we try to one up them, being a little better than them in certain aspects, trying to differentiate […]
……Putting In The Time…..
I was in a fascinating discussion with a group of thoughtful sales managers. During the conversation, we were talking a little about the great resignation, quiet quitting, and doing the work. A manager posed a question, “Clearly most sales roles and all managers roles aren’t something where you punch a clock. You can’t expect to do the job in 40 hours a week. It probably takes more, but how much? When do we know we are asking our people to do to much? How do we know when we are just spending too much time on the job.” It is […]
Mine Is Bigger Than Yours!
Get your minds out of the locker room! I’m talking about your Sales Stack! Is it big enough, is it bigger than others in your industry? I suppose it’s not surprising, but there’s a lot of talk about the importance of sales stacks. As you would expect, much of it is driven by the vendors of sales technology tools. Apparently, at least according to them, the secret to sales success is the number of sales technology tools an organization deploys–less the strategies the organizations deploy in engaging customers in meaningful ways. As an example, recently a vendor sent an offer […]