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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
Chasing The Money
Opportunities for sales people are skyrocketing. As we emerge from the pandemic, as organizations cope with the “great resignation,” there are more opportunities than there are good sales people to fill them. As a result, organizations are tossing money at the problem, comp increases of as much as 30-40% are common. A recent article said average tenures for sales people have declined to 11 months. I worry about this–both from an organizational/hiring manager point of view and for sales people. For hiring managers, what experience and skill can we expect people to have? Even for the simplest of sales roles, […]
What Does The Customer Need To Move Forward?
There’s a major flaw in most of our (sellers/marketers) mindsets when we think about opportunities and the customer buying journey. This flaw is embedded in our engagement approaches, our processes, how we think about deals and moving forward. The flaw is thinking about, “What do we need to do next to move this opportunity forwards?” The problem is this focuses on our own perspectives and needs. It focuses on our informational needs, the activities we need or want to conduct to more favorably position our offerings. It is usually optimized around how we want to work with the customer and […]
“This Is The Way We Have Always Done Things…..”
I was reading a LinkedIn conversation between a number of people I really respect, though sometimes I’ve been known to disagree with them. This particular conversation was about SDRs, with one person saying, “SDRs have always been an entry level position and always should be.” Another person was suggesting, “But it’s one of the most difficult roles, particularly if we expect them to engage senior level executives. We set them up for failure, we should staff SDR roles with more experienced people.” Those who have followed me for some time know my $500K SDR experience. This conversation is an example […]
Prospecting Is Hard, Why Do We Insist On Making It More Difficult?
Every day, I spend at least 15-20 minutes cleaning my inbox, mobile, and InMail from prospecting messages. Mind you, these are not spam, but legitimate prospecting messages from people trying to catch my attention. The majority, I never open, I just delete. Every once in a while, one catch’s my attention and I skim it. Prospecting has always been a challenge, but these days, it is even more challenging. Getting someone interested and to respond to an outreach is really difficult. Part of the challenge is standing out in the sheer volume of messages that prospects receive. As I’ve whined […]
Why Should We Expect Our Customers To Change?
What sellers do is drive customers to change. Whether it’s a change effort they’ve initiated, or we are trying to incite them to change. But why should we expect them to change, particularly when sellers have failed, so miserably, to change the things we do in creating value with our customers? It strikes me as the height of irony–or perhaps arrogance–that we continue to do the things we have always done, perhaps with a new jargon or a veneer of technology, but fundamentally too few of us have changed how we sell. We have hundreds to thousands of books, we […]
Doing The Whole Job
LinkedIn is filled with surveys about, “What is the highest priority focus for [Fill In Your Favorite Role]?” There are surveys asking for the one area sales managers should focus on. These cover things like comp/metrics, training, forecasts, hiring, sometimes even coaching. There are surveys for sellers covering things like prospecting, pipeline management, closing, sales process. These surveys fill my feed, each trying to suggest, “If we/I do this one thing very well, we/I will achieve our goals.” If sales management and selling were that easy….. The problem is, these are false choices. We can’t choose which part of the […]