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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 Results: Principles Versus Techniques/Tactics
How do we create sustained results as sales professionals? After all, our jobs are: Create differentiated value with our customers.Execute our company business strategies with our customers.Achieve/exceed our goals and objectives. There are thousands of “experts” providing advice to sales people on how to best do our jobs. Thousands of posts and books, give the latest insights, techniques, principles to “help” sales people. The web is loaded with titles like: “20 [choose the number you want] tips/techniques to get the customer to……”“Just do this one thing for guaranteed sales success…..”“Here’s the quota busting playbook for success in…..”“Get prospects to return […]
“May I Send You A Free Proposal”
I got an intriguing email today. The subject line grabbed my attention–though I suspect not for the reasons the sales person intended: “May I send you a free proposal?” It got my mind spinning, Who pays for proposals? Is the sender so arrogant, or clueless to think that an offer for a free proposal would catch my interest because it stands our from all the other offers for proposals that I get? It’s also interesting, this person has the arrogance to think they can give me a proposal, without ever talking to me and knowing what I want to do, […]
Prospecting Differentiation
We want our prospecting efforts with customers to stand out. To, somehow, differentiate ourselves from the dozens of other prospecting calls or emails our customers receive. Unfortunately, our efforts at differentiation tend to focus on the wrong thing—we focus on us–ourselves, our companies, what we sell. This leads our prospecting conversations to discussions about us: “This is what we do…..” “This is what we sell…..” “This is how great our company is….” “These are the people/companies we work with…..” “This is how we are different……” All of a sudden, a call that is supposed to be about the customer is […]
Driving Growth
Every executive I speak wants to see growth in their businesses. Growth drives revenue, it provides funding for new product or market development, which in turn drives more growth. As sales and marketing professionals, it’s our responsibility to identify and pursue those growth opportunities. But we miss so much! Matt Heinz referenced Gartner data in a recent LinkedIn post. It ‘s a provocative post, call this one “jumping on Matt’s bandwagon.” The first interesting data point is: In looking at our addressable markets, at any one time, only 3-4% are active buyers. Some might view this as very small, but […]
Compressing Our Customer’s Buying Process
I read a post about influencing and accelerating our customers’ buying decisions. The author thought trying to acclerate or “move in” the buying decision was wrong. I don’t disagree–usually, our motives for trying to do this is getting an order and making out numbers. Toward the end of a month or quarter, managers seem to always focus on, “What can we move in?” Often, we provide “incentives,” to accelerate a customers decision, usually those are some form of discount (Ironically, we are training our customers on behaviors that get the discounts. If I were a customer, out of principle, I […]
Focusing On The “Mobilizer” Is Not Enough!
We know in complex B2B buying decisions, there are over 10 people involved in making the decision. There are many others who influence this group, and it only takes 1 person to veto a buying decision. Ideally, we have at least one “Mobilizer,” some one within the buying group that is proactively advocating for our solution. But focusing our sales efforts on that Mobilizer is insufficient to drive success. More typically, we focus all our sales efforts on the person we know–whether that person is a mobilizer, or just the person we know. We put all our “eggs” into this […]