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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
“All Sales Problems Are Pipeline Problems….”
“All sales problems are pipeline problems, and all pipeline problems are prospecting problems…….” I was having a conversation with a really smart person. He went on to say, “Ultimately, we can track most issues to how we opened the engagement…” My immediate reaction was, “Well, yes, but……..” I think too many managers don’t even look this deeply, but have similar views, the solution to all anemic pipelines is more prospecting. They don’t even look at refining the initial engagement approach in prospecting, they just demand more. But I’m uncomfortable with this, I wish diagnosing sales performance issues could be that […]
How Do Customers Prospect?
Maybe it’s just me, but have you experienced this hugely annoying trend—both in LinkedIn and though email? It’s customers prospecting–looking for solutions to their problems. Every morning, I find my inbox filled with all these annoying emails/InMails. “We are looking to buy electronic components to use in a new consumer product we are developing. Can we take 15 minutes of your time to talk about how you might help us?” “We are expanding our factory capacity and need to add a new assembly line, can we talk about your products as a potential solution?” “Our IT development backlog is overwhelming […]
The 21 Buying Methodologies
Recently, I’ve been somewhat fixated on the concept of methodologies. I wrote Which Sales Methodology and The Next-Gen Sales Methodology. The first article focused on current sales methodologies, I referred to an article discussing 21 Sales Methodologies. In the second, I suggested a Project Management/Problem Solving approach to the next gen sales methodology. I wanted to test some of my thinking about both the current and future methodologies. In doing this, I developed the following premise: “For a selling methodology to be effective, there has to be a buying analogue/counterpart to the methodology” Stated differently, if we are going to […]
A Next Gen Sales Methodology
Recently, I wrote Which Sales Methodology, suggesting the 21 plus sales methodologies may not be sufficient as we look to the future. I’m not sure I’ll present a methodology for the future, but I will suggest design principles for a Next Gen Sales Methodology. The next gen methodology should be focus on helping the customer navigate their buying process more effectively. Most current sales methodologies focus on what we do to the customer. The new methodology must focus on how we work with the customer. Actually, customers already solved this issue, the leverage project management principles. So rather than inventing […]
On Forecast Accuracy
I’ve been having a fascinating discussion on forecasting and forecast accuracy. While we will never be perfectly predictive, we can get better than the current forecast discussions as illustrated below: Manager: “What’s your forecast for the quarter?” Salesperson: “What number do you need?” But we spend a lot of time talking about forecasting, without looking at the real underlying issue. Let’s imagine the case that we can be 100% accurate in our forecasts (no I’m not smoking anything). Having an accurate forecast is relatively unimportant if we are only achieving 50% of the number we should be achieving. Of course, […]
Challenging The Status Quo
A sale will never happen until the status quo is challenged in some way. Perhaps, the customer has experienced problems or challenges. Perhaps they are discovering new opportunities they want to pursue. They decide to change, initiating, among other things, a buying journey. Too often, the customer doesn’t recognize the need to change. They are too busy to notice things could be better. They may think, “If it ain’t broke….” They may not be aware of a better opportunity….. Or they may feel the pain of change is greater than the pain of doing nothing. But they need to change. […]