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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
Sales Is All About Relationships
Sales IS about relationships. This truism is often parroted, but too often, has many and divergent meanings. What do we mean by relationships, what are the relationships we seek to develop as sales people? There’s the old stereotype of a relationship oriented sales person, where selling is only about the relationship–usually some socially oriented relationship. This is the sales person that’s always bringing coffee, taking customers out to lunch, inviting customers to any number of events. They are the sales person that always sends your spouse and kids birthday cards (believe it or not, I still get them from sales […]
Getting Things Done
It seems our days are consumed with meetings. We have meetings to develop win strategies for a deal. We have meetings to develop proposals. We have endless reviews–pipeline, deal, account, territory reviews. We have meetings to talk about new programs or initiatives. We have meetings to talk about meetings. And then there are the meetings we have with out customers–all following similar patterns to those mentioned above. Yet, despite all these meetings, somehow we struggle with getting things done. Part of the problem is these meetings get in the way of getting things done. We need to have fewer, more […]
Great Selling Is Not Something We Do To Customers
As usual, I got embroiled in a LinkedIn conversation on selling. What sucked me in was the preponderance of opinions around what we must do “to the customers,” rather than with them. We always use language of things we subject customers to: We prospect them We qualify them We pitch them We discover their needs We demo to them We propose a solution We handle their objections We deliver value to them We close them We move on to the next victim, I mean prospect Customers and prospects are the subjects and objects upon which we do things to. But […]
When Is An Interruption Not An Interruption?
Recently, I had an interesting email exchange with someone who clearly had bad experience with sales people. The conversation started around the “intrusiveness,” and “obnoxiousness” of sales people “interrupting” this person’s day. I had a lot of empathy for this person. Every day, I can calls from numbers I don’t recognize (the majority of them are local, even the same exchange……). I rarely pick them up. I know it’s a robocaller or a poorly prepared sales person. It’s the same with emails. My email system is pretty robust. My spam filters the worst. I’ve set up other filters that divert […]
Pipeline Quality And Integrity
I must have done thousands of pipeline reviews over my career. Somewhat casually, I toss around the terms “Pipeline Quality And Integrity” Usually, we get into a discussion about what these things mean–it’s dangerous to assume people understand. But I usually talk about those terms collectively, that is I don’t differentiate between “Quality” and “Integrity.” Up until yesterday, no one had ever asked me, “What do you mean by integrity? Are you suggesting my sales people may be lacking integrity? Or are you really talking about quality?” The question caused me to pause and think a moment. As I reflected, […]
Why Do 95% Of Customers Buy The Last Day Of The Quarter?
If I’m to believe the pipelines I spend lots of time reviewing, there is an odd phenomenon, at least 95% of customers make their purchase decisions and issue POs on the last day of the quarter. At least that’s the data sales people tend to share with me. Every pipeline I look at says the same thing. I got to wondering about that. Since we are in Q4, I think it’s remarkable and very kind of customers to come in from their holidays on December 31, to hand us POs. I worry them might get writer’s cramp, signing all the […]