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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
We Need Sellers Who “Sell,” Not Take Orders
I’m suppose, after all the years I’ve spent working with “sales people,” I shouldn’t be surprised. But I continue to be stunned by how few people who are in sales roles, truly sell. Too many are information concierges with an agenda. They are dependent on a prospect finding them, who has done all the heavy lifting. They’ve determined they have a problem, they are doing their homework, they have questions. Need discovery in these cases is not about the customer business needs, challenges, but about the product or service the customer seeks. Changing customer views is more about shifting their […]
Prospecting Is Not An Event!
We get so much about prospecting wrong. We reach out to people who are far outside our ICP, people we should never be talking to, wasting our/their time. We contact other prospects, only to pitch our products and services, ending with, “Are you interested, can I invite you to a demo.” We don’t do our homework, we don’t understand the customer, their challenges or where they might be interested in helping. We inundate prospects with email after email, call after call, LinkedIn messages, texts, everything. We believe “volume” is the path to prospecting success. And every once in a while, […]
Understanding The Numbers
When we talk about business, we quickly get to talking about the numbers–revenue, profit, EBITDA, EPS, growth, market cap, market share, customer retention, customer satisfaction, headcount, productivity, inventory, cash flow, assets, liabilities, and on and on. SaaS companies have invented their own versions of the numbers, including ARR, CLV, LTV, CAC, MRR, Churn, and so forth. The numbers generally represent goals, or where we are in achieving those goals. The numbers aren’t what companies do, or why we do what we do, or even how we are doing those things, but they are indicators of how well we are doing […]
Do Your Friggin Homework!
We struggle with achieving goals and producing results. Whether it’s prospecting or working a deal, we diminish our impact and results because we aren’t doing our homework and preparing ourselves and our customers/prospects to accomplish our shared goals. It starts with our prospecting and establishing new relationships. For example, this morning I get a LinkedIn invitation from someone in the ‘protection and counter-terrorism” field. He wanted to connect with professionals in the same field. Or those that say, “I want to learn more about you and your business,” yet they’ve not even taken the time to look at my profile. […]
Are You Managing The Process Or Is It Managing You?
Deal review after deal review, I see the same thing. Sales people don’t seem to be managing the process, they are responding to what the customer is doing (or not doing). This is particularly frightening, when one recognizes customers don’t know how do buy, they wander through the buying process, going back and forth, starting and stopping, changing direction, getting lost. Then more frightening, the majority of their buying journeys end in no decision made. But deal review after deal review, I pose the question, “What are the next two critical things you and the customer must do to move […]
Sales People Need To Pay Their Way!
Over the past several weeks, I’ve gotten into a number of discussions about the “economics of selling.” They’ve covered the gamut from rationalizing what we spend on sales and sales people, affordability and how much we can invest, to optimizing the investment we make in sales, assuring we get return on those investments. In one conversation, a statement struck me, “Sales people have to pay their own way.” All of a sudden, it struck me that the reality is sales people have to pay the way for everyone in the company, not just paying their own way. Stated differently, everyone’s […]