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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 Joy Of Selling…,” Have We Lost It?
As a preface, my friend, Hank Barnes, wrote me saying he and several others are declaring October 12 as “World B2B Pet Peeve Day.” He asked me to contribute a post commemorating this occasion. I struggled a moment. Regular readers know that I write a lot about “pet peeves.” Whether it’s bad prospecting, bad Social Channel interactions, bad selling, weak sales management, ineffective training, and so forth. I’ve written so much on where we are underperforming our potential as sales professionals, or undeserving out customers. I thought for a while, then realized something that has been bothering me for some […]
“Sorry For Reaching Out Randomly….”
I’m quickly going through my email. I opened an email that I knew would be a prospecting email, but I decided to read it since it had made it through all the filters I set up. I made it through the first 2 sentences: “Hi David,Hope you’re doing well! We are sorry for reaching out randomly.” I stopped there, adding the email to my spam folder to block future communications. The problem, we can never be prospecting randomly. Yet most of what I see is just that, a random outreach because someone has guessed my email, phone number or social […]
Who Is Your Customer?
Do you know who your customer is? More importantly, do you know who your customer isn’t? Perhaps the biggest thing that impacts our performance is we don’t know who our customer, we define our ideal customer in such vague terms that we waste a lot of time and brand equity on customers that we should never be selling to. If my various inboxes are any indicator, the majority of sales and marketing people do no targeting other than, “Do we have an email? A phone number? A LinkedIn ID? We get prospecting outreaches from companies that should never reach us. […]
Is This Problem Important For Your Customer To Solve?
We struggle to get in front of customers, to find opportunities, to nurture them through the buying cycle, and, ultimately, to win. Yet, the majority of those complex buying opportunities end in “No Decision Made.” For those that are left, we hope to win our fair share. And then after our customers have made a decision, we learn there is high decision regret. They aren’t confident they have done the right thing, they won’t achieve their goals, they could have made a better business decision. It’s not an image of optimism, both for our customers and for sales. If we […]
Moving From Information Scarcity To Abundance
In the “good old days,” perhaps 10+ years ago, salespeople were the primary source of information about potential solutions for their customers. Customers and prospects sought sales people to learn about new solutions, trends in the markets, what other similar companies were doing. Customers, also, looked for other sources of information–through networking with others, conferences, trade magazines, research companies, consultants, and others. But getting this information, particularly high quality, trustworthy information was a challenge. Customers often found themselves wanting more, or questioning the quality of that which they were getting. They struggled with the issue, “Is there anything else we […]
Moving From Product Features To Insight
Recently, I was doing a workshop with a really great sales team. We were talking about how to engage prospects and customers more effectively. They enthusiastically embraced the idea that we have to talk about what customers are interested in; we have to engage customers in issues critical to them and their business. But then we decided to practice these principles. We started looking at the conversations we needed to have with prospects. As good as this team was, they always started with, “Our products do these things….” As much as they tried they were stuck, they always started the […]