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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 Answer To Every Selling Challenge Can’t Be, “Do More!”
I’m sorry, I’m truly frustrated and sound like a broken record. But I’m getting really sick of the standard answer we hear from too many “experts,” guru’s, sales/marketing managers. But doing more seems to be the universal solution to every selling challenge. The “thoughtful” posts from the guru’s show charts. They are all the same, focusing on dials, focusing on emails, focusing on touches. They run the math we learned in 3rd-4th grade (remember learning “times” tables). They develop the models, projecting yields from these efforts, projecting the results of those efforts. And we now know how to work the […]
Virtual Selling Is Not The Same Thing As Digital Buying
According to much research and too many pundits on social media, the future of selling is virtual–or perhaps hybrid. Well yes, kind of, but we are really missing the point. While we focus on developing our virtual selling skills; do you have the right camera/lighting, an appropriate background, are you dressed appropriately–at least from the waist up, are you looking at the camera, not the person’s image on screen…… our customers are doing something different. Of course, they are engaging sales people through virtual channels, but that’s an increasingly small part of how and where they spend their time in […]
The Digital Buying Journey Frees Us To Create Real Value!
We misunderstand the customer digital buying journey and what it means to our customers and to sellers. Too many focus on the ability of customers to create a Rep-Free buying experience. One would think it’s mostly customers liking this, but shockingly, too many sales people love this. Some arguing, “now I get to focus on the small percentage that really wants to talk to me…” But the digital buying journey, even the preference for the Rep-Free buying experience creates an entirely new opportunity for sales people to create real value for our customers. There’s little that sales people can to […]
Data Is Data, Not Laws Of Nature!
Over time, I’ve noticed some striking things about data and how we misuse it. Too often, with the singular exception of Revenue/Quota attainment, we treat data as a goal, or a physical constant/law of nature. We see this in our own individual and team performance data and in how we respond to research and market data. For example, we look at pipeline data like win rate, average deal value, sales cycle. We view these as constants, let’s just pull some numbers out of the air (they are actually real, but I don’t want to embarrass anyone.). Let’s imagine we have […]
Why Are Sellers So Anxious To Kill Off Selling?
There’s a huge amount of discussion about the digital buying journey and the shifts our customers are making to “Rep-Free” buying. We have plenty of data and anecdotal experience citing customers allocating less time to working with sales people, choosing digital (remember digital is different than automated) channels over working with sales people. It’s not unreasonable to conclude that customers want to deal with sales people as little as possible. But, perhaps we need to dive deeper. Research also shows that customers are relatively agnostic about channels through which they learn and how they buy. They want a great, effective […]
Are You Asking The “Right” Questions
We know effective questioning is critical for sellers and leaders. Virtually every training program provides some instruction on questioning. But too often, we may be asking the wrong questions–both of our customers, people, and of ourselves. I’ve written, frequently, how we tend to ask the wrong questions of our customers. Usually, our questions focus on getting us the answers and information we need to serve our purpose, booking a deal! We have our normal BANT oriented questions, we ask about budgets, we ask about decision-making processes, decision-making authority, their needs, when they are making a decision. We ask what they […]