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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
Oh No! It’s A RFP?!?
I recognize that I’m jumping around in my continued series on “Things we thought we understood about selling, but really don’t.” Today’s topic is RFPs. Normally, I do everything I can to ignore these, but in talking to clients, I realize how misunderstood these are, and how poorly we leverage the RFP process. First, I have to confess a bias. We never respond to a RFP that we haven’t written! While that sounds arrogant, it illustrates the key point we miss about RFPs and managing them. Recently, I spoke to a VP of Sales. He said, “Most of our business […]
Are Your Customers Doing Their Homework?
Hank Barnes’ research on buyer remorse (and other things) is some of the most important research for sellers to understand. He recently wrote a post, “Who Is Responsible For Expectations?” It’s best to read his research, but a net summary of one of his points is, “Buyers who have put less time in doing their homework, up front; those that engage only at a superficial level, have a much higher degree of remorse, for those decisions they make.” This is a key issue, if your customer isn’t committed to doing the work, if they are taking shortcuts through their buying […]
Isn’t It All About The Buying Process?
Yesterday, I published a rather long article on the Selling Process. It’s part of my series of articles about “Things We Thought We Understood About Selling But Really Didn’t.” Apologies, the article was rather long, but the selling process is so important. Understanding it, executing it well is the cornerstone to our success. In recent years, we’ve acknowledged the concept of a customer Buying Process. Many have argued abandoning the Selling Process, focusing on the Buying Process, in the least we must align the selling process with the buying process. We even create charts of the stages customers go through, […]
The Selling Process–Yep, That Again
Continuing my series of posts on the things we thought we understood about selling but really don’t, I’m tackling the selling process. I can already hear the groans and suspect many of you are about to click, moving onto something else. But hang in there, the selling process is one of the most important fundamentals to our effectiveness as sellers. There’s so much to cover, I’m going to split this into two posts. In this post, I’m going to focus on the basics of the process and it’s importance. I’m going to ignore the relationship of the selling process to […]
“Selling Would Be So Great If It Weren’t For Those Friggin Customers!”
I’m stunned by how many sellers hate their customers! Sit and talk with a group of sellers talking about the past week or so. Comments like, “They are so stupid…. they are clueless…. they don’t know what they are doing….Turkeys!” Those comments aren’t just limited to customers. Marketing, legal, pricing, product management, managers……everyone else become subjects of our frustration. And, likewise, many of those people express their frustration with sellers in similar ways, marketing, sales enablement, sales, ops, management, customer experience, often say to themselves, “Those sellers are just so incompetent….. Why don’t they do their jobs…. We’d be better […]
Discovery, It Isn’t All About Us
Continuing my series on selling skills we thought we knew but really don’t understand, I’m want to focus on Discovery. It’s a natural follow on to qualifying–actually it’s a complement, qualifying and discovery go hand in hand. Some misunderstanding we have about discovery. We tend to think of it as a “stage” in our selling process. We prospect, qualify, discover, propose, close….. So we do discovery at certain stage, check that off, go onto the next stage. Another fundamental misunderstanding is that discovery is for us. We ask the customer lots of questions about their needs and requirements. We try […]