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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
Considering “Irony”
We seem to be in a headlong rush to automate and depersonalize our marketing and sales engagement. It seems the future is “virtual” biasing whatever interaction we have with customers to being action at a distance through Zoom, Teams, or other platforms. We are automating our customer engagement processes, citing customer preference for “rep-less buying” experiences, ignoring the high levels of buyer regret, based on those rep-less experiences. We seem oblivious to the customer confusion, overwhelm, and uncertainty, despite the data around sensemaking and decision confidence. We seem to be racing to dehumanizing organizations and the buying experience, focusing on […]
RFP’s?
I was doing a Q&A after a keynote at a SKO. It was a very sharp group of sales people committed to improvement. A question came up, “Dave you talk about how we differentiate ourselves through creating value with the customer, helping them make sense of what they are trying to achieve, helping them have great confidence in their decision. But a large part of our business is RFP’s. We’re constrained by the structure of the process of the RFP’s, how do we help customers with that.?” It’s a great/challenging question, particularly for sales people doing government and public sector […]
How Do We Do Better?
Numbers are important in sales. Our goals are based on the numbers. KPI’s are based on the numbers. We claim to be numbers driven. And, too often, we miss the numbers. We don’t hit our revenue goals, we don’t have enough pipeline, we aren’t getting the results from our prospecting. There’s the easy, universal answer to these challenges. It’s what most managers do. As sales people, we know what the manager is going to say before we even walk into the “coaching” session. The universal answer is “do more!” To solve quota problems, we need to chase more opportunities, we […]
“Customers hate…..[Fill In The Blank]…”
All my news feeds are filled with guru’s talking about how much customers hate certain sales approaches. Some of the most fashionable are: Cold calling, prospecting, any kind of email, social channels, pitches, sales people, ……. The lists go on and on. declaring the dissatisfaction with everything we do in selling. Pretty soon we are tempted to throw up our hands in frustration and just wait for inbound calls. Oh, but they hate that too! So then we start declaring the death of sales, with customers going on their rep free digital buying journey’s. Oops, those are filled with buyer’s […]
“What Do You Think Cold Calling Is?” Again?????
Apparently, I stuck my foot into my mouth, but I’m getting use to the taste of shoe leather. It’s Friday, it’s been a busy week. I was reading a LinkedIn article on “Cold Calling….” I’m beginning to think articles or surveys about cold calling happen when you don’t have anything else to talk about. The topic of cold calling will always raise opinions — however well or poorly informed those might be. This survey was seeking opinions about the timing of the demise of cold calling. The author’s premise was that “cold calling” would decline as use of the telephone […]
Pricing Is Never A Sales Problem
Recently, I had an interesting conversation with an executive. He reported on pricing problems within the sales organization. It didn’t make sense to me, so we dug into the issues a little. I can’t recap the conversation, but here are some of the issues we discussed: Pricing is never established by sales It’s usually established by some combination of product management, finance, and sometimes strategy. It’s based on huge numbers of factors and organizations create pricing from any number of factors. Sometimes, is a simple as a cost plus basis (I hope not), sometimes it’s based on value realization, sometimes […]