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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
What’s Important To Your Customer?
We know our solutions have to create value for our customers. The challenge, however, is making sure that value we create is important to our customers. Too often, we focus only on the cost of our solution. We compete on the basis of price, too often making sure our price is less than those of the competition. Sometimes we try to create some justification for our higher price—“We have more features, functions, bells, and whistles…..” Implicit in this approach is the customer already knows the benefits of implementing the solution, so the most value is created by the lowest price. […]
Our Customers Don’t Know What They Don’t Know
Recently, I was in a discussion with a group of outstanding sales people. They were talking about how to align their selling process with the customer buying process. One of the sales people asked, “How do we learn their buying process?” Some readers may think, “Isn’t this obvious?” After all, classically, we know we have to do discovery, what are their needs and requirements, who’s involved, what is their decision-making process, what alternatives are the considering…… It’s all sales 101, so why do we struggle so much in understanding the customer buying process. Implicit in these questions is there is […]
On Measuring Sales Performance
It’s becoming increasingly complicated to measure sales performance–particularly in complex B2B sales. We are used to setting quotas and measuring our progress against those quotas. But our measurement systems are getting increasingly complex. First, as we look at leveraging teams to sell complex deals, I hear increasing concerns with, “Who do we credit?” Particularly, when many people contribute and we need to credit different people. Second, are we measuring the right things? Is revenue/orders the only thing we should be measuring? Are there other goals, equally important to achieving our overall organizational goals, that we should be measuring? I think […]
Are You Engaging The Real Customers?
I was doing a series of deal reviews–not unlike most of the deal reviews I do. We were talking about the people involved in the buying process. What struck me in each discussion was how few people were being engaged at the customer — and that the right people weren’t being engaged, even by the customer buying group. Typically, the sales team focused their engagement strategy through one person–usually a friend or sponsor. Sometimes, there were a small number of other people involved. In the reviews, the sales people confidently said, “We’ve identified all the people in the decision-making process.” […]
The Problem With Account Planning
I was asked to sit in on a number of account plan updates. It’s mid year, so it’s time to pull out the account plan, blow off the digital dust, and update it. (you might be getting an idea of what I think about most account planning processes.) The structure of the account plans looked like 99% of the account plans I have seen (and if I’m honest, some that I used to develop decades ago). The first few pages were about the customer. Some financial and business data was presented—revenues, profits, growth. Some of the strategies and priorities for […]
It’s Not Always About The Deal
One of the things I see too many sales people doing is focusing only on the deal. That is, when we finally find and qualify an opportunity, our focus is on the deal only. We have meetings with the buying group, we focus on all the things we need to do to move the deal forward, winning a PO. Every conversation is about the deal, where the customer is in their process, and what we have to do next. But we miss the opportunity to enrich our relationships and continue to teach our customers. Sometimes we focus so much on […]