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
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 Second, we have outdated views of the sales process.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 […]
Partnering And Selling
I cringe every time I get an email or social media invitation, “Dave, we’d like to partner with you…..” It’s always code for, “I want to sell you something!” Alternatively, “Can I get you to do something form me?” But it’s become prevalent. I wonder why sellers are so embarrassed about what they do and their goals, that they can’t be direct with the people they are trying to reach. We should be proud of being sellers, at the same time we have to recognize that we only achieve our goal of selling, through helping the customer achieve the goals […]
The Answer To Every Selling Challenge Can’t Be, “Do More!”
I’m sorry, I’m truly frustrated and sound like a broken record. But I’m getting really sick of the standard answer we hear from too many “experts,” guru’s, sales/marketing managers. But doing more seems to be the universal solution to every selling challenge. The “thoughtful” posts from the guru’s show charts. They are all the same, focusing on dials, focusing on emails, focusing on touches. They run the math we learned in 3rd-4th grade (remember learning “times” tables). They develop the models, projecting yields from these efforts, projecting the results of those efforts. And we now know how to work the […]
Virtual Selling Is Not The Same Thing As Digital Buying
According to much research and too many pundits on social media, the future of selling is virtual–or perhaps hybrid. Well yes, kind of, but we are really missing the point. While we focus on developing our virtual selling skills; do you have the right camera/lighting, an appropriate background, are you dressed appropriately–at least from the waist up, are you looking at the camera, not the person’s image on screen…… our customers are doing something different. Of course, they are engaging sales people through virtual channels, but that’s an increasingly small part of how and where they spend their time in […]
The Digital Buying Journey Frees Us To Create Real Value!
We misunderstand the customer digital buying journey and what it means to our customers and to sellers. Too many focus on the ability of customers to create a Rep-Free buying experience. One would think it’s mostly customers liking this, but shockingly, too many sales people love this. Some arguing, “now I get to focus on the small percentage that really wants to talk to me…” But the digital buying journey, even the preference for the Rep-Free buying experience creates an entirely new opportunity for sales people to create real value for our customers. There’s little that sales people can to […]