Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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.
All my news feeds are filled with guru’s talking about how much customers hate certain sales approaches. Some of the most fashionable are: Cold calling, prospecting, any kind of email, social channels, pitches, sales people, ……. The lists go on and on. declaring the dissatisfaction with everything we do in selling. Pretty soon we are tempted to throw up our hands in frustration and just wait for inbound calls. Oh, but they hate that too! So then we start declaring the death of sales, with customers going on their rep free digital buying journey’s. Oops, those are filled with buyer’s […]
Read MoreRecently, I had an interesting conversation with an executive. He reported on pricing problems within the sales organization. It didn’t make sense to me, so we dug into the issues a little. I can’t recap the conversation, but here are some of the issues we discussed: Pricing is never established by sales It’s usually established by some combination of product management, finance, and sometimes strategy. It’s based on huge numbers of factors and organizations create pricing from any number of factors. Sometimes, is a simple as a cost plus basis (I hope not), sometimes it’s based on value realization, sometimes […]
Read MoreI wrote, Win/Loss Analysis–Are You Learning As Much As You Should? As I mentioned in that article, I continue to be amazed by how casually we treat win rates and how little we understand what causes us to win and lose. There is too much of a tendency to accept what they are building strategies around the volumes we need to pursue to achieve our goals. Just to put an emphasis on the importance of understanding why we win, why we lose, and how we maximize performance and productivity, let’s go through an example: Let’s assume 3 sales people with […]
Read MoreRecently, I’ve had some “interesting” conversations with the CMOs about their email marketing strategies and the marketing messages they are inflicting on me. I There are different laws, regulations and recommended practices on email marketing, both how one gets placed onto and email marketing list and how one “unsubscribes.” The CAN-SPAM act is one of the simplest/most benign from a marketing point of view. Things like GDPR have some tougher conditions. Somehow in the regulations, one can “subscribe” to email marketing outreaches simply through emailing a question, downloading a paper, or making a purchase. Even if a person is not […]
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