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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
Why Are Sellers So Anxious To Kill Off Selling?
There’s a huge amount of discussion about the digital buying journey and the shifts our customers are making to “Rep-Free” buying. We have plenty of data and anecdotal experience citing customers allocating less time to working with sales people, choosing digital (remember digital is different than automated) channels over working with sales people. It’s not unreasonable to conclude that customers want to deal with sales people as little as possible. But, perhaps we need to dive deeper. Research also shows that customers are relatively agnostic about channels through which they learn and how they buy. They want a great, effective […]
Are You Asking The “Right” Questions
We know effective questioning is critical for sellers and leaders. Virtually every training program provides some instruction on questioning. But too often, we may be asking the wrong questions–both of our customers, people, and of ourselves. I’ve written, frequently, how we tend to ask the wrong questions of our customers. Usually, our questions focus on getting us the answers and information we need to serve our purpose, booking a deal! We have our normal BANT oriented questions, we ask about budgets, we ask about decision-making processes, decision-making authority, their needs, when they are making a decision. We ask what they […]
It’s All About Retention And Growth!
Ask any sales leaders, particularly those in SaaS based sales approaches, retention and growth in current customers is critical. There’s a lot of data supporting this. We look at Cost Of Customer Acquisition, learning it is much less expensive to retain and grow a current customer than it is to acquire new customers. We look at Lifetime Customer Value of long term customers as being far greater and more profitable than those who churn. We have all sorts of metrics focused on the issues of customer retention and growth. Customer and revenue churn, Customer engagement/NPS scores, Months to recover CAC, […]
Forcing The Customer To Do “Our Jobs”
It’s no wonder customers are, increasingly, opting for a rep-free experience. Not only do we not understand what they are trying to do; or we focus primarily on our interests and quota attainment rather than their goals; but we force them to do our jobs! Buying (with the exception of procurement) is not our customers’ primary job. They have their day jobs, which may be overwhelming. Then on top of that, they are trying to fix something, change, take advantage of an opportunity–which often provokes a buying journey. Somehow, they have to find the time to fit this into their […]
The Only “Guaranteed” Sales Advice!
Everyday we are deluged with tips, techniques, hacks, and tricks to improve our ability to prospect, sell, win, achieve quotas. Some of it is good, some is well intended, too much is just a demonstration of ego or an attempt to separate people from their money. There is no end to the pronouncements, “Just do these 2 [Insert your own number] things and you will win!” Having studied these for years, I’ve decided it’s about time to jump on the bandwagon. I have come up with the definitive piece of sales advice. It’s guaranteed to give you success. I would […]
Rethinking Value
I was having a fascinating conversation with a good friend and client. We were talking about the challenges his people had in articulating value and differentiation. The products they sell had become highly commoditized. In the past, where there had been significant product based differentiation, over time, with more competition and market changes, everty thing changed. Today, there is virtually no differentiation between products offered by his company and those offered by the competition. All had pretty much the same specifications, features, functions. (We see this in virtually every product. For example PCs, CRM, ERP (at least the traditional major […]