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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
“This Is Just The Way Things Are…….”
I have to confess huge frustration with too many of the conversations I see in my social feeds. People take a position, leveraging (perhaps cherry picking) data to support their premises. While, their arguments make sense–obviously, they’ve structured them to make sense, but they are fundamentally flawed. Most of the time, they are just defenses of the status quo. And it’s ironic, because too often they think they are presenting deep insights and “aha” moments. But they justify their insights through defending the status quo. For example, recently I got into a “discussion” with someone arguing the importance of volume […]
More Meetings Or Better Meetings?
O Meetings are critical to achieving our performance goals! It is through these meeting, whether F2F, virtual, phone, that we engage our customers, helping them navigate their buying/problem solving process. So it stands to reason, that more meetings would drive higher levels of performance. To increase our attainment, we just need to conduct more meetings. And for many, achieving meeting goals is a critical performance metric. We know how many meetings we have to conduct to find and qualify a deal. The math to get 10 new qualified deals is easy. We can now set goals for meetings, doing the […]
AI, Freeing Up Selling Time…….
Everyday, we see new ways that AI helps us accomplish more in less time. It helps us research our customers, prepare emails, actually do the outreach, plan calls, manage many of our responses, update CRM, understand our numbers, alert us to new opportunities, ……. It seems each day, we see parts of our jobs that AI can do better than us, freeing up our time, making us more productive. There are some strategic issues as we look at AI agents, there is the possibility that AI can actually replace us. Human beings won’t be necessary for certain types of transactions, […]
The Problem With “Solution” Selling
OK, most sellers are clueless about solution selling. They’ve been taught to pitch products! They talk about product capabilities, features, functions, move to a demo, then close. The customer has to figure out whether the product solves their problem. Fortunately, for these sellers, customers are engaging them in the last 15% of their buying process. By that time, they have figured out their problem, they have researched solutions, they have narrowed it to a shortlist, and they are interested in learning about the products. And this is what most sellers are trained to do. In complex B2B, this approach isn’t […]
The “CEO Card……”
I’ve been reading a number of articles about how win rates skyrocket when you get a very senior exec or founder involved in a sales opportunity. Sometimes opening a deal, sometimes in the final stages of a deal. These experts expound on how to get these exalted people involved in deals to drive executives involved in opening and closing deals for reps, all quoting increases in win rates (one cited a 408% increase which makes me wonder how bad the team really was!) And I get it. Executives just because of their titles can get much higher levels of engagement […]
Information Asymmetry…..
Information Asymmetry has been a powerful tool in buying/selling almost from when Eve convinced Adam to take a bite of an apple. Centuries ago, Francis Bacon said, “Knowledge is power.” We’ve always tended to wield that knowledge as a weapon, creating advantage to us. Information asymmetry occurs where one party has a disproportionate informational or material knowledge advantage over the other party. When I first started selling, simply giving my customer data sheets/specs, case studies, brochures about products drove my ability to engage them in conversations about their business. The customer needed in formation about potential solutions, and the easiest […]