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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
Who Are You Learning From?
Yeah, I know I’m dating myself, but I’d like to paraphrase a line from the 1980 Johnny Lee Song, Looking For Love. There’s the famous line, “Looking for love in all the wrong places….” Too often, I think we are looking to learn in all the wrong places. (I’ll come back to those who aren’t even looking to learn.) We, often, tend to overlook great people and places to learn from. Too often, we look to experience. Or with social media, to those with some sort of fame or voice. “They have 10 years more experience than me, they must […]
What Do I Do With The Answers To These Questions?
I had a fascinating call with a young sales person. He’d been reading a lot of my blogs, particularly on the “customer’s why.” He had been trying to apply the concepts in improving his customer conversations. “Dave,” he asked, “I tried everything you suggested in your blogs. I really tried to understand what the customer faced, whey they needed to change, what the consequences of not changing might be. I drilled down in understanding their business and how they felt about what they face. “But, after the conversation, I had all this information and didn’t know what to do with […]
What Is The Customer Completing In Their Buying Journey?
Right now, open up your CRM system. Go to the opportunity tab, look at your sales process steps. It will probably reflect critical stages and selling activities, enabling you to move through your process. Probably, it also creates a “probability assessment,” that is a likelihood of winning. Unless your system has been modified, it measure your progress through the selling cycle. For example, the probability of an opportunity in prospecting is much less than qualifying, which is less than that for proposing, and in turn less than that for closing. It measures your progress through the sales process, but not […]
The LinkedIn Algorithm
I was talking to Amy. “Dave,” she said, “Your posts aren’t optimized For the LinkedIn algorithm” “You could get 10 times more likes and comments If you just write for the algorithm” I appreciated Amy’s idea, she’s a rockstar. But I wondered, Is that the point? Do I write for LinkedIn’s algorithm? Do I write for likes and comments? Particularly when, most of the comments are… “You’re the man, Dave!” I guess LinkedIn’s algorithm, doesn’t like substantive conversation. But curious, I studied the algorithm. I think LinkedIn has a literary bias. Perhaps it’s Iambic Pentameter. It doesn’t appear to look […]
Are You Solving For Your Customers’ “Feeling”
“Sales is all about people!” It’s been one of those throw away terms all of us have heard about selling since the very first day we started selling. In the old days, a lot of this was interpreted as “relationship sales,” and implemented as social interactions like taking them to lunch, the golf course, telling jokes, making sure you sent their kids birthday cards. Customers saw through this pretty quickly. While they may have taken the sales person up for the lunch of the golf game, these sales people weren’t being helpful to the customer in solving their problems. Fast […]
Do Our Discovery Questions Really Allow Us To Do That?
The discovery part of the buying and selling proceesses are, perhaps, the most important part of the process. It is a huge amount of the shared learning process we start with our customers. But, do we really “discover,” in this process, or are we just seeking confirmation for what we want to hear? Too often, our discovery questions are highly scripted to get us to learn the things we need to know to better sell? First, we ask a series of questions to qualify, nominally, the opportunity. We only want to know one thing, “Is this a good fit for […]