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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
The Sales Person As “Contextualizer”
Context is everything! Each of our customers is different, each company has different goals, strategies, priorities, challenges, cultures, values. Though they may compete head to head, or participate in the same industry, or the same markets, every company is very different. People are different. We categorize them by their titles, CEO, VP of Sales, VP of Marketing, or by their persona, or by their behavioral style, or by their role in the buying process (remember economic buyers, technical buyers, influencers, decisionmakers.) But each person’s hopes, fears, dreams, and challenges is unique to them, the situation they face at a point […]
How Do You Win?
My good friend, Andy Paul, and I were talking about the state of selling today. We were commiserating about the absence of discussion about “How Do We Win?” So much of the discussion about sales these days focuses on the top of the pipeline, that is, how do we find more opportunities. The reason people are worried about finding more opportunities is that we are struggling to make our numbers. The fashionable answer to making our numbers is doing more–finding more opportunities. Alternatively, if we are making our numbers, and we are driven to grow, the fashionable answer is, find […]
“I Think There’s An Opportunity To Work Together…”
The LinkedIn invitation started with: “Dave, I think there is an opportunity for us to work together….” We all know what that is code for, the individual simply wants to sell me something. We use all these words to try and mask our objective. We might “work together,” or we might “partner,” or one of my favorites, “let’s collaborate.” We use them to, not so thinly, disguise our real intention, “We want your money!” Why do we think our prospects are stupid, why do we think we are distracting them from our true intent–we want to interest them in buying […]
Our Customers Are Voting With Their Time
Several years ago, Gartner research on how customers allocate their time in the buying process indicated about 17% of their time is meeting with sales people—all sales people, not just us. We just get a fraction of that 17%. (I’d be interested in seeing an update to that research, I suspect it will be less than 17%.) Customers are looking for, and finding, answers in other places. In part, this makes huge sense, if they can more efficiently find the answers they need through digital research, then they are more efficient (perhaps not more effective) in their buying process. But […]
Are You The Salesperson Creating Value For Your Customer?
I was talking to a team of sales people about engaging their customers with insight and getting them to think about their businesses in different ways. They happened to sell supply chain management software. The software, like most other supply chain software solutions enabled their customers to better understand and manage inventory, orders, quality, scheduling and other things with their supplier. We had developed some unique insights based on benchmarks with customers and supported by case studies. As we were talking about what these meant to the customer and how to engage the customer in the conversation, a sales person […]
When Less Is More
It seems the universal answer to every sales performance answer is to do more. We’re chastised to close more deals, get more into the pipeline, spend more time with customers, spend more time–period, just do more. Regardless of where the challenge is, whether it’s our close rates, our average deal value, our sales cycle, our ability to create value, our pipeline volumes; the dominant solution is to focus on the top of the pipeline, prospecting. And the dominant approach is to just do more prospecting! Virtually, every guru has the answer, you have to prospect more. Whatever you are doing […]