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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 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. […]
What’s Driving Your Customer’s Need To Buy?
Understanding what’s driving our customers to change, to address a new opportunity, to solve a problem is critical to our success as sales people. We need to understand what’s driving their need to buy. However, too often, when I ask sales people about the need to buy, they describe it in terms of their products or solution category: “They need to buy HR Software” “They need to buy servers” “They need to buy IT Development services” “They need to buy our semiconductors” “They need a CRM system” “They need to buy…….” We can never describe our customer’s needs to buy […]
Obsessing On The Competition
The sales call started nicely. The sales person started asking me questions about my business, what I wanted to achieve, challenges we faced. He asked the alternatives we were considering. Then things went south, really quickly. He asked me what I like about the competition. At first, I thought it a clever approach. He might then start to talk about his solution in the context of the things I highlighted. He could help me learn about his company’s approach to dealing with the same things. He might help me think about different ways to achieve the same goal. He might […]