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
When The Going Gets Tough….
We are, in the very least, facing huge uncertainty. The global economy–are we headed to a recession, how will inflation be impacted, what does this mean to our ability to grow, what does this mean in terms of actions we might take to curtail spending, hiring? We still face supply chain challenges and uncertainties. We are looking at increases in global conflicts. We are looking at the majority of people rethinking their lives and what work means? Everywhere we turn, we see disruptions and uncertainty. Some represent tremendous opportunity, some represent threats, and some it’s too early to know. But […]
On Driving Performance
As leaders, a key element of our job is to maximize the performance of each person on our team. We do this through hiring the right people, training, giving them tools/processes/programs/systems to help them perform, providing the right support, eliminating barriers to their performance, and constantly coaching/developing them. We set performance goals, we measure their attainment against that performance. And then we get to compensation. We try to develop compensation plans that incent people to achieve those goals. Often, it’s very simple, some sort of compensation based on revenue, or possibly quota attainment. But sometimes, that’s not sufficient for achieving […]
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 […]