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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
“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 […]
“Did We Do The Right Thing?” Customer Engagement, It Can Be Really Simple!
We struggle with customer/prospect engagement. We send endless emails trying to engage them. Our autodialers help us make 1000’s of calls, in the hopes that one person will pick up. We flood social channels with prospecting messages. We send endless texts. We know we have to reach customers through multiple channels. Technology and automation enables us to provide ever increasing volumes of messages across all these channels. Yet customers aren’t responding. They don’t want to talk to us, they aren’t engaging. So we do more. We execute our sequences, even thought they aren’t engaging the targets of those sequences. For […]
Fixing Our Win Rates! Improving Performance!
I wrote, Win/Loss Analysis–Are You Learning As Much As You Should? As I mentioned in that article, I continue to be amazed by how casually we treat win rates and how little we understand what causes us to win and lose. There is too much of a tendency to accept what they are building strategies around the volumes we need to pursue to achieve our goals. Just to put an emphasis on the importance of understanding why we win, why we lose, and how we maximize performance and productivity, let’s go through an example: Let’s assume 3 sales people with […]
The Ethics Of The “Unsubscribe”
Recently, I’ve had some “interesting” conversations with the CMOs about their email marketing strategies and the marketing messages they are inflicting on me. I There are different laws, regulations and recommended practices on email marketing, both how one gets placed onto and email marketing list and how one “unsubscribes.” The CAN-SPAM act is one of the simplest/most benign from a marketing point of view. Things like GDPR have some tougher conditions. Somehow in the regulations, one can “subscribe” to email marketing outreaches simply through emailing a question, downloading a paper, or making a purchase. Even if a person is not […]
Critical Selling Skill: Literacy
Reading Is Fundamental has been the mantra of a children’s literacy not for profit by the same name. I’m writing the management team to suggest they expand their services and offerings to sales people. Like everyone, I get inundated with emails and social platform prospecting outreaches. They fall into three categories: Less than 1% are relevant, interesting and I follow up to learn more. About 50% are irrelevant, unfocused, and just uninteresting. They are usually not the greatest prose, but at least I get their point, regardless of how bad they are. About 49% are unreadable. They may be something […]