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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
The Problem With “Discovery”
For decades, sales people have been taught about the importance of “Discovery.” It’s a series of questions we inflict on the customer. We use it, both to qualify opportunities, and to understand how to position our solutions to win. We learn how to ask a series of questions to understand their needs, to understand who will be involved in the buying decision, to understand their budgets, to understand their decision criteria and timeframe. The thinking behind the discovery process is that once the customer gives us all those answers, we can then undertake a series of activities to position our […]
The New Sales Channel
Channels “partners” have been a part of sales ever since sales have existed. Channels are a high impact route to market, they enable us to connect with customers we can’t easily connect with. They provide capabilities, amplifying our offerings, enabling our channel partners and us to create greater value to the customer. They may provided deeper expertise in certain areas than we can, consequently, driving higher levels of success. We put in place programs to attract channel partners (or if we are a channel, to attract the companies developing the products/solutions) getting them to sell our products. We train them, […]
Automation And Ineptness
Automation and technology, properly implemented can do tremendous things to augment our capabilities. It can make us more productive. It can enable us to be more efficient. It can give us deeper knowledge and insight into the people we seek to engage. It’s hard to imagine not leveraging technology to help improve our ability to connect and create real impact with our prospects and customers. At the same time, like virtually everything, automation can be horribly dangerous. It enables us to create crap at the speed of light. It enables us to demonstrate our ineptness, lack of caring, absence of […]
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 […]