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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
Do You (And Your Customer) Have A Real Deal?
Probably one of the weakest areas of buying and selling I see is “qualifying.” As sales people, there are dozens of acronyms, if any are applied, you have a “qualified deal.” BANT is the grandfather of all of these, but others have come up with their own alphabet soup pushing their approaches. These can be helpful if applied, but too often, sales people don’t apply them in a disciplined fashion. However, these are for sales people to use, hopefully, in finding good deals to chase. But just because the customer can answer those questions doesn’t necessarily mean the deal is […]
Situational Adaptability
I got a prospecting call. We had actually arranged a conversation, the company had something that interested me–software for our business. I had reached out, checking the box, “please contact me…..” The sales person called, he started his questions. They weren’t really relevant, I had actually done my homework and I had questions on several specific issues. I stopped the sales person, saying, “Here’s what I’m concerned about…….” The sales person paused, then started asking questions, but they weren’t about my issues. I suspected his playbook had another set of questions–not about my issues, but they must have been “plan […]
Virtual Selling Is Not The Future Of Sales! Part 2
It’s become high fashion to declare the future of selling is “virtual.” While F2F, telephone, text, and other approaches will continue to exist, everything is moving to virtual. Usually, there’s a whole bunch of data to support why this is important. For example, sales people can make back to back sales calls through the whole day. Rather than making a few calls, they can schedule every hour of the day with Zoom calls. That improved productivity data is always accompanied by cost of selling data. We get more done with the same resources. There’s a problem to our thinking on […]
Virtual Selling Is Not The Future Of Sales! Part 1
As we emerge from the pandemic, there are a lot of discussions about the future of sales. A lot of the discussion focuses on virtual selling–leveraging technologies like Zoom, Teams, and others as key engagement approaches. F2F continues to play a role, but many of the “pundits” are declaring virtual selling to play the dominant role. These positions are usually supported by productivity and cost of selling data. I suppose, it’s human nature to look for the single thing that drives success. Perhaps, a century ago, pundits declared the future of sales was the automobile—we could see more customers more […]
Asking The Wrong Questions!
Our engagement strategies are, too often, failing us. I suspect it’s because we are asking the prospects (and perhaps ourselves) the wrong questions. At the lowest level of execution, we ask if they are interested in learning about our products or solutions. Or sometimes we are presumptive and tell them, without their asking. We are taught to ask about needs, but getting answers to those questions means the customer is actually fairly advanced in their buying journey. They have, through other sources, learned enough to be able to articulate their needs. We are taught to ask them about their problems, […]
Who Is OUR Buyer?
People like Hank Barnes, Scott Gillum, Ardath Albee, and Maureen Blandford are doing some great work in helping us rethink the question of “Who is our buyer?” In addition to helping us define our buyers in much richer terms, they are helping us think about how to incite them to buy. For years, we’ve had concepts around “Ideal Customer Profiles” and “Personas.” We’ve characterized our customers with things like firmographics and demographics. We proudly say, “We sell to the financial services companies with more than 10K employees and assets under management exceeding $10B.” That helps us narrow our focus on […]