Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Selling Process Or Buying Process?
This is a trick question—but there is a lot of confusion about whether sellers should be focused on the selling or buying process. Of course the answer is both. Some might fairly argue, “We are better aligned with the customer when we focus on the customer buying process.” Of course! And too often we fail to do this, focusing on what we want to accomplish–executing our selling process. We implement sequences of qualifying, discovering, demoing, proposing, closing. Each step is scripted, we are driven to execute it as quickly as possible. As much as possible we try to shoehorn, the […]
“A La Carte” Comp Plans
Every once in a while, some of us go to a 5-star restaurant. Rather than ordering off the menu, choosing appetizers, soups, entrees, sides, desserts, wines, piecemeal; we ask the chef to prepare a complete meal. The chef makes the choices for everything from soup to nuts (literally), making sure we get a complete meal (where we might skip things ordering from the menu). The chef makes choices such that each dish complements and works with the other, even making the wine choices. The focus is on a once in a lifetime dining experience, skipping nothing. While these experiences are […]
Are You Credible?
Credibility is critical to our ability to engage people, incite them to think differently, and drive change. Regardless of our role, credibility is critical. Whether with our customers, our business partners, our people, peers, our managers, our communities. If we have no credibility with our intended audience, we can achieve nothing. We seek to be credible because it is an important element of trust and our ability to influence others. Too often, we focus on “symbols” of credibility, rather than being credible. It may be our job title, the company we work for, the companies we have worked for, our […]
Call Prep, Doing The Work!
It seems in virtually every professional endeavor that the prep work is as important, sometimes, more important than the actual work itself. The singular exception seems to be selling, we seem to have a predilection for one of two things–winging it or sticking to the script. Every professional athlete prepares for the event. It’s not just the normal practice, running plays, practicing serves, working out. They study their opponents. They want to learn everything they can–their strengths/weaknesses, how they respond, how they think. Doctors are the same, despite the hundreds of times they may have done a procedure, they study […]
We Just Need To Make More Customer Calls!
Universally, we hear, “We just need to be talking to more customers!” More seems to be the universal answer to all sales problems. At the same time, customers are not responding to our outreach. We need more emails, more dials, more LinkedIn InMails, more of everything to produce the same volumes we achieved only a year ago. We spend millions on tools to free up sales person time, automating the processes. We analyze each word they say, tuning the scripts based on what the analytics are saying. We now know we can only ask 4 questions and must swear–so we […]
Should Sellers Respond To Personalized Cold Emails “Out Of Respect?”
99% of the cold emails I get are personalized. Usually, it’s David, though only my mother calls me David, most people, unless they are angry call me Dave. I’m most commonly called “You Jerk!!” Sometimes it says my company name, “Excellenc.” That’s not a mispelling, look at my email, but they still haven’t done their homework. The company’s actual name is Partners In EXCELLENCE. A large number of those personalized emails are actually right, addressed to Dave or David, only close friends say “You Jerk,” they actually know me. And these emails refer to my company name correctly. Of the […]