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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
Is “Helping Our Customers” Incompatible With Selling?
Recently, I’ve been reading a series of discussions debating the concept, “Can we really be driven by helping our customers while still focused on selling?” Some of the comments revolved around, “How can we sell if we are focused on being helpful? It’s incompatible to be driven by a goal to be selling a certain solution.” I have to confess reading the discussions several times, trying to understand the arguments being made. To be honest, there were only opinions suggesting sales people need to focus on selling products, less so being helpful. Somehow, it seems the argument is “It is […]
Whose Deal Is This?
Who in the sales organization owns the responsibility for a deal? Who is responsible for leading the development and execution of the deal strategy? Most of us would respond, thoughtfully, “It’s the sales person’s responsibility!” Sadly, though, in practice it looks very different. To many managers, often well intended, take the deal over, they end up running the deal strategy and execution, sometimes delightfully surrendered by the sales person. Let’s get back to basics. It’s the sales person’s responsibility to “make the number.” The managers’ jobs are to support their sales people in doing this. They do so by coaching, […]
If Buyers Are Failing, Sales Can’t Succeed
Recently, I wrote, Rethinking Sales Enablement. I suggested we might do better by thinking Buyer Enablement. I want to build on this theme. Human nature, I suppose, causes us to focus on our success. Are we winning the deals we choose to pursue? Are we making our number? Are we achieving the goals we’ve committed to achieve? We measure our success based on our ability to achieve our goals. But we are missing something important. If our buyers fail, we fail-or we underperform our potential. Let’s look at a couple of data points. We’ve long known, courtesy of Gartner, that […]
Our Questions Are Important To Us, But Do They Get At What The Customer Needs To Express?
The questions we ask shape the responses we get. Too often, our questions, whether they are questions we ask our customers or questions managers ask their people, limit our ability to learn and understand the real issues they face. We focus on the issues most important to us–which tend to focus on our products and services–but may miss the issues that are really critical to the customer. We may take the customer down a path that helps us learn, and may help the customer learn more about those things we are interested in. But we and our customers may miss […]
How Do We Win?
Participating in deal reviews, I often ask the question, “How do we win?” The answers are always similar: “We have to show how our product/technology/solution is better than the competition.” “We have to meet or beat the competitors’ prices” “We have to build support across the organization showing them how our solution is the best.” “We have to sweeten the deal in some way.” “We have to get in front of the key decisionmakers and show how we are the best solution.” “We have to leverage our references, telling the customer how great we are.” “We have to get our […]
Attention To Detail….
Perhaps one of the most important capabilities/skills for sales people and managers is “attention do detail.” But I seldom see anyone writing about it–so I will try to change it in this article. Great selling, great leadership are always characterized by attention to detail. Whether it’s probing to determine root causes underlying customer “pain.” Or exploring alternatives with our customers, helping them customers think differently. Or getting underneath the data in our dashboards and understanding “why.” Attention to detail is critical to driving the highest levels of performance in everything we do. Our sales enablement programs look at “Discovery.” We […]