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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
Who’s Coaching Our Customers?
Everyone needs coaching. I’ve spent a lot of time in this blog talking about coaching as key to driving performance in sales people. I’ve written extensively about directive and non-directive coaching–focusing on non-directive as the most impactful in helping sales people learn and grow. Effective coaching is really a shared learning experience between the manager and the person being coached. Ideally, the manager learns more about their people when they coach. The sales person learns how to think about what they are doing and how to be more effective–whether we are coaching deal, account, territory management, prospecting, or pipeline skills. […]
Is Trust Sufficient?
Colleen Francis is running a fascinating survey on LinkedIn. She’s posed the question, “If buyers know you, like you, and trust you, will they buy from you? It caused me to reflect, “is trust sufficient?” Without a doubt, trust is can be a critical element in the customer’s buying decision—we look at the opposite condition, “Would people buy from people they don’t trust?” We are hesitant to buy from people/organizations we don’t trust. We may do this when the risk is very low, when we are very familiar and confident in the offering, when there is no other reasonable opportunity. […]
Value Is Not A Destination
Too often, when sales people talk about value, it seems it’s some sort of fixed outcome customers should expect if they buy the sales person’s solution. Corporate web sites and sales people talk about, “Our value proposition is…..” In all honesty, when in my early years in selling, I tended to position value as the endpoint customers would achieve if they bought the products I sold. It’s a pretty antiquated view of value. The reality is that we must be creating value with the customer for the entire life cycle of our relationship. From their very first digital engagement with […]
Are You Important To Your Customer?
I have to admit, and apologize to a few folks, I lost it in a meeting today. We were talking about an account strategy. The sales person wanted to meet with the top executives of a very large corporation. I’d been asked to help strategize this and help figure out how they attract the attention to the top executives. “How is what you do important to these executives?” I asked. “Well they spend a lot of money on us,” replied the sales person, “They should be interested in talking to us.” “I know they are one of our largest customers, […]
Stop Wasting Time Prospecting!
95% of our prospecting is just wasted time, so just stop it! It’s too much time to find that 5% who want to talk, and if they really do, they’ll reach out to you anyway, inbound is so much easier. Think about all the time you are wasting. You are sending those 1000’s of emails–granted, it doesn’t really take that much time, you’ve automated it. You only have to hit a few keys and you can send 100’s of emails to unsuspecting people. “Dave, I’d like to tell you about our products….” You follow those with phone calls, that’s much […]
Are We Having The Right Conversations?
I was talking to a great sales person the other day. We’ve been talking for several months about how to improve his prospecting. In our last discussion, he said, “Things have changed completely, I’m now having the right conversations with my prospects!” It’s a common challenge, we struggle to get our customers to respond, we struggle to engage, we don’t make the progress we hope for. The problem is we usually focus on our agenda, the things we want to talk about. Too often, that’s about what our company does and what our products do. Sometimes, we present these in […]