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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
It’s Not The Lack Of Information That Stops Us….
We live in a world with an abundance of information. One might, fairly, claim we are drowning in information/data. This is profoundly different from what we faced 5, 10, 15, or more years ago, when information availability was far more restricted. Back in the “old days,” finding high quality information, relevant to what we needed was very difficult. But today, the challenge is the opposite, we have too much good quality information. One would think, with this abundance would make things easier. We should be able to make better choices, more easily. Buying should be easier as customers find more, […]
“Doing More,” Is Not A Growth Strategy! Neither Are Miracle Cures!
As sales professionals, we are responsible for driving revenue growth for our companies. We are accountable for executing our overall corporate strategies and priorities in our chosen markets. We develop, or should be developing, “go to customer strategies” to achieve our goals. We assess things like our ICP. We look at how to we reach and engage the customers in our ICP effectively and efficiently. We assess our value creation and differentiation strategies. The strategy will look at things like overall structure and engagement process. Do we leverage channels and partners? Do we sell direct and what the organization we […]
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 […]