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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
On Giving Thanks
In the US, we have this custom of reserving one day each year of giving Thanks. It’s a time to get together with family and friends, over indulge in eating and watching football (The American version). And we do take moments to reflect and give thanks. There is a lot that we, and specifically me, can be thankful about at this time of year. A year ago, we reflected on a year that most of us have never encountered–health, economy, social and other challenges causing us to rethink everything we believe in and do. A year later, we face many […]
Buzzword Bingo, Sales Edition
Some years ago, partly to overcome the boredom of PowerPoint pitches, Buzzword Bingo was developed. Whether at a conference listening to speakers wax on about how fantastic their technology and companies were, investor meetings, sales pitches, people played this game. It came from the endless buzzwords that presenters injected into their presentations to feign credibility. We would score certain types of words differently. For example things like “cloud, edge computing, data lakes, digital transformation, resilience, scalable, gamify” would get certain scores-with heavy multipliers based on the number of times they were mentioned in one chart or presentation. Then there were […]
Our Selling Process Can Help Our Customers Buy
From my earliest days as a salesperson, I’ve been taught the “sales process,” and have tried to execute that process as effectively as possible. It’s always a structured approach to engaging the customer, working with them to make a buying decision. The process has always reminded me of critical things I should be considering, to maximize my impact in working with the customer. The sales process has always had multiple stages, stages that focused me on finding new opportunities, qualifying them based on a customer commitment to take action, understanding what the customer wanted to do, other things that may […]
Are We Accomplishing Enough In Customer Meetings?
Ideally, we are spending as much time as possible, working with our customers to help move them through their buying process. At the same time, customers are engaging sales people for only a small time in their buying process. This raises the questions, “Are we accomplishing as much as we can in each engagement? Are we maximizing our contribution to the customer in those ‘meetings?’ Could we accomplish more, creating more value with the customer? Are we engaging the customer in a way that earns us more time and greater engagement for the customer?” Unfortunately, I think we fail too […]
The Customer Focused Sales Process
We’ve long known (whether we use it or not) about the “sales process.” Virtually every organization has some variant of a sales process with stages we move through and, possibly, critical activities we should be executing within each stage. Usually, these are all focused on what we have to do to achieve our goal–getting a PO. We prospect to find potential opportunities, we qualify some with the idea the prospect is interested in buying our products. Then we go through some sort of discovery process. Usually this focuses on identifying their needs for solutions we sell, understanding how much they […]
Everyone Has A Customer
We struggle to be “customer focused.” Somehow, our priorities and goals have precedence over understanding and helping our customers. At the same time, we know the most effective/efficient path to achieving our goals is through our customers, creating great value with them. But what if everything we do, in every part of our organizations focused on serving the customer. How would that change our engagement strategies? How would it change everything each person in our organizations do? Some would scratch their heads, saying, “We get it, our companies have customers. But it’s the job of sales, marketing, and customer service […]