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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
We’ve Got The Discovery Process All Wrong!
Too often, we fail in our initial engagements with our customers. In our prospecting and discovery calls, we focus on their need for a solution–our solution. Our questions have an agenda, we want to get to talking about our solutions as quickly as possible. We may start in the right place, trying to understand the customer needs or problems, but we steer our follow up to our products as quickly as possible. For example, we might ask, “How are you doing this…..” “Do you have this problem….” “Have you seen this….” For each of these, we are trained to move […]
What About Digital Buying Rooms?
There’s a lot of good conversation around creating Digital Selling Rooms. Increasingly, we see very powerful ways that sellers and customers can engage in their buying process and learning. Typically, sellers invite customers to Digital Selling Room. The rooms enable sellers to provide relevant content for use by the customers. They can track how this content is used, which content the buyers focus on. Digital Selling Rooms are a convenient way to convene meetings between sellers and buyers, track what’s going on, keep notes on next steps we and the customer might take. Some Digital Selling Rooms provide capabilities for […]
Customers Are Spending Less Time With Salespeople…..
Both the data an our experiences show this, customers are spending less time with salespeople. Seller reactions are what we might expect. We read of customers, in a buying process, spending no more than 17% of their time with all sales people–us and our competitors. We see customers choosing, increasingly, rep-free buying experiences. These have created a frenzy of activity on the part of sellers, how do we get the customers to spend more time with us? We are driven for more meetings, more pitches, more demos—even though much of that customers can get more effectively through other means. I […]
A Guaranteed Method Of Getting Customer Meetings!
Everything I read, every conversation I have with sellers; the same issue arises. “How do we get customers to respond, how do we get meetings with customers?” I’ve been reflecting on this issue for some time. I’ve finally come up with the solution. It’s a slam dunk guarantee–ignore the gimmicks and tricks all the experts and guru’s offer. I’m offering this up freely. Drum roll please……. Yes, the tension is building, I know some of you have leapt forward in this article to get the answer. OK, here it is: We will be able to get the majority of customers […]
Standing Out When The “Well Is Poisoned”
Recently, I’ve had a number of conversations with frustrated executives. CROs and CMOs want to have their teams do the right thing in engaging their prospects and customers, “The well has been poisoned!” Everyone is focused on inundating our prospects and customers with messaging through every channel. The volumes of emails, phone messages, texts, social media communications are astounding. “How do we stand out, how do we capture our customers’ attention when they are overwhelmed with messaging?” Some think they have the answer, it’s the same answer, “We have to do more!” They believe the strategy is to combat volume […]
What Our Customers Are Trying To Learn….
As sellers, we seem to think the most important thing to our customers is learning about our products, services, and solutions. But there’s a lot more to complex B2B buying than just learning about various products and services. The list of things our customers struggle to learn includes: Why change, what’s driving the need to change, what happens if they don’t, what are the risks to that change? How do they define the problem, how do they make sure it is well defined, how do they assess the current impact of that problem? Who does the problem impact, how does […]