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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
Win/Loss Analysis–Are You Learning As Much As You Should?
I’m always stunned by how little win/loss analysis we do. Of course, when we win or lose a deal, there is some reason code–usually some drop down in CRM that gives us a handful of choices about why we won or why we lost. Sales people usually don’t put much thought into it, wins are generally the result of the “fantastic job they did selling,” losses are either price or product deficiencies–often both. The win/loss reasons don’t give us much insight into what really is happening, or what we might do about it. Sometimes, usually on the “mega-deals,” we might […]
Empathy Is Insufficient!
We know empathy is important in working with others, whether it’s our customers, our peers, or our people. If we can’t understand what they face in doing their jobs, what they care about, what their hopes, dreams, or fears, doubts might be, we can’t connect with them in meaningful ways. Too often, however, the concept of empathy is absent in our interactions. Customers are very abstract—they are leads to be moved through our process, from person to person. We focus on our goals and productivity, we pitch our products/solutions. We don’t understand our customers’ businesses, we don’t understand who they […]
The “Heavy Lifting” In Buying And Selling
Selling is difficult. We have to find opportunities for our products and solutions. We have to assess the customer interest in considering our solutions. We have to understand what the customer is trying to do and demonstrate how our solutions are the best in helping them achieve their goals. We have to be aware of the alternatives the customer considers and position our solutions favorably. We have to move the customer to a decision, hopefully culminating in an order. This process can take months for very complex solutions. Dozens of people may be involved in the process. Buying is disorderly–where […]
It’s A New Year, What Should We Be Asking Ourselves?
It’s a New Year. Somehow, even if we don’t believe in New Year resolutions, we use the New Year as a moment to refocus and reset. For those organizations on a calendar fiscal year, it’s a restart—new goals, quotas, perhaps shifted priorities. Even for those organizations with a different fiscal year, subconsciously we tend to reflect and reset much of what we to. As we ramp up into the New Year, what are some of the key things we should be thinking about? What are questions we might ask ourselves? Perhaps we should take a few moments before going into […]
How Do We Make People Better Off By Working With Us?
Reading an article about Patagonia’s and other’s strategies, I was struck by the sentence, “How do we make people better off by working with us?” It’s a fundamental question that has so many applications: Our customers? Our employees? Our suppliers? Our shareholders? Our communities? Usually, when we think about thing, we focus on our return, we answer the question, “How do we make things better for ourselves?” As sales people, we focus on our goals, quotas, and commissions. The customer is only a vehicle for achieving those. As leaders, too often, we focus on ourselves and our own goals. Again, […]
“Sensemaking” Is Not Just For Our Customers
Brent Adamson wrote an outstanding HBR article on “Sensemaking For Sales.” It’s an important concept, focused on helping our customers make higher quality decisions, with greater confidence. One of the most important things Brent discusses is how customers tend to cope when faced so much high quality information. Customers tend to fall back on what they already know and have confidence in. These cognitive biases tend to drive “belief perseverance,” and “status quo bias,” doing what we’ve always done. Brent, also, highlights three styles that sales people adopt to help their customers. The “giving” approach is one where the sales […]