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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
In Praise Of Lazy Sales People!
I’m fascinated by studying lazy sales people! Let me qualify that a little, I’m fascinated by studying lazy sales people that consistently achieve their goals. There seems to be a “macho” mentality in too many sales people/leaders. They express pride in how many calls they make, how many dials, how many emails, how much social selling engagement, how they are leveraging the tools. I read a post from some “expert” talking about the long hours of work, declaring he starts his day at 3 am! ( I suppose each of us could make that claim, regardless when we start our […]
Better Results From Each Activity Or More Activities?
Spoiler alert, this is a trick question, but probably not in the sense that you might think. Recently, I got sucked into a LinkedIn conversation (Yes, I have to be better at resisting clickbait). But it was a fascinating conversation started by Anthony Iannarino. It was on the importance of effectiveness and efficiency. And Chris Eckert provided a very thoughtful counterpoint in the discussion There were several things fascinating about the discussion. First is the observation of the myopic focus too many have on “activity.” This seems to be the mantra of too many pundits, and when one looks at […]
Getting The Digital Buying Journey Wrong
I visited the website of a very large enterprise software provider. I found myself at this website to help me better understand some of the issues my client faced. I wanted to learn more about the issues and the things my client should be considering before they even considered looking toward solutions. While this software provider is a major provider of solutions to the challenges I believed my client had, I wasn’t yet ready to look at the solutions. I wanted to help my client think about the problems and issues first. They needed to define those and what they […]
It’s Account Planning Season
Now that SKO season has passed, we’ve got our annual quotas, we’ve started rebuilding our pipelines after depleting them at year end, we’re into account planning season. It’s time to pull out those powerpoints you updated a year ago, blow the digital dust off them, and update them. We plug in the new numbers—the account financial performance in the past year, our quotas/goals for the account. We may update the plan with key accomplishments from last year, new org charts, and a few initiatives we plan for next year. We present the plans, management nods their heads in the right […]
The New Sales Process
Most of our “sales processes” are failing us. There are a couple of core reasons we’ve found. First, sales people don’t pay attention to them or execute them poorly. This post isn’t for those people. Second, we have outdated views of the sales process. We design it to be a relatively linear progression of activities we undertake with the customer. Despite knowing the customer buying process is very squishy and wandering, we design our processes to be relatively rigid, rigid to the point of being highly scripted. Overlay on this, the focus is on our activities and the activities we […]
“Do You See Challenges We Aren’t Managing Well?”
I agreed to speak with the sales person. Responding to his email, I asked, “Do you see challenges that we aren’t addressing well? Why do you think we are a good prospect for your solutions? I didn’t think it was an unreasonable question. The sales person had reached out suggesting he could help us grow and improve in ways we hadn’t experienced. At our meeting, the salesperson responded to my queries (He was selling a sales/marketing tool). “Our solution interfaces with virtually every CRM, We automatically capture most activity, feeding that to CRM and other systems. We leverage AI technologies […]