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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
Getting Commitments….
All of us, as we develop as sales professionals, learn that we need to seek commitments from the customer. The commitments are, often, small. A commitment for a next meeting, a commitment to provide information, a commitment to check references, a commitment for a demo, a commitment for….. These commitments help keep us engaged with the customer and, hopefully, they with us. And, as we have been taught, the more commitments the customer makes with us, the better positioned we feel we might be. We also tend to think of commitments as progress–progress in developing the relationship, progress through the […]
Being Interesting Or Interested?
Spoiler alert, we really seek to be both interested and interesting, and we hope our prospects/customers are both interested and interesting. However, to maximize the opportunity for this to occur, there is important sequencing of this process. As sellers, we do everything we can to be interesting. We leverage provocative insights, we develop pitches we think are interesting/even compelling. We learn all sorts of “opening” techniques to be interesting in our calls. We spend endless hours constructing subject lines and first sentences in emails, all in the hopes of being interesting. Or worse, we blindly take what marketing or someone […]
We Won, But…..
We celebrate our wins and victories, as we should. Sometimes, we do a debrief on why we won, so we can learn and improve our execution in future opportunities. Often, we focus on all the things we did; we engaged the right people, we talked about the issues that were important to them, we had a superior solution, we were more compelling than the competition. We usually focus on everything we did right, causing the customer to choose us. But when we do our “win analysis,” we too often miss some important things, and these can be critical to our […]
“Salesperson, Why Are You ‘Ghosting’ Me?”
To be honest, I may respond to less than 5% of the sales outreaches I get. I trash or spam most. But I’ve noticed over 60% of those that I do respond to, I get “ghosted.” By that, I mean, some sales person has taken the trouble to find me and reach out to me, and I’m interested enough to say, “tell me more….” But they disappear. Every day we read of the struggles sales people have in attracting interest, getting people to respond. We spend all sorts of money learning what we might do to better generate interest. We […]
What’s The Most Important Thing?
Everyday, we get pummeled with LinkedIn Surveys asking us “What’s the most important thing…….” Everyday, people doing “research” post surveys asking us to express our views. We’re given a few choices. They are on all sorts of things: Prospecting, doing deals, or something else…. Where we prioritize our time…. Focusing on the numbers or something else…. Insight or pitching or something else…. Which technology is most important, CRM, something else….. Which activities are important……. Customer focus or…….. Current customers or new customers….. Telephone, email, social media, or something else…. Revenue or orders or …….. Chocolate, vanilla, strawberry….. (OK, I invented […]
The Questions We Ask, Shape The Answers We Get…..
In sales, we learn that questions are critical to our ability to understand our customers and how we might be most helpful. Questions, in addition to eliciting information, opinions and points of view; can enhance both the our customers knowledge and build their confidence in us. It’s always a thrill to ask a customer a question, hopefully deeply insightful, that elicits a response, “No one has ever asked me this before. In fact, I had never considered it myself. Can you help me understand more?” But too often, we ask the wrong questions, both we and the customer fail to […]