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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 If Every Electronic Outreach Cost $.50?
In the “old days,” (about 20-30 years ago), my VP’s of marketing used to come to me for approval on major marketing campaigns. In those days, direct mail/direct marketing was still a primary communication channel. Marketing campaigns could be pretty expensive, there was design, printing, postage (they were always stamped because people opened stamped mail more then metered and trashed bulk mail). Getting/developing the right list was critical–it was harder to get good contacts/addresses, and because of the expense, marketing wanted to make sure they were targeting precisely the right people, not wasting mailings on people that weren’t in the […]
Are Our Customer Conversations Substantively Different Than Internal Discussions?
The other day, I published a post, “Are Traditional Selling Skills Even Relevant Anymore?” It’s generated a lot of great ideas and good discussion on both sides of the topic. One of the premises I had in the article is that the skills/challenges we face in driving change within our own organizations, and that those customers have within their organizations are not much different than the conversations/engagement that sales people and buyers have. They are human to human discussions, with all the same characteristics–disagreements, disinterest, differing points of view, alternative views on potential solutions, fear, confusion, confusion, convincing, negotiation, reaching […]
In Examining 27,357 Wins, 95% Of Sales People Did This One Thing!
Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of research, and collected our own data and analytics on what causes sales professionals to win. We’ve seen certain patterns emerge. Things like engaging the customer early in their process, ideally being the organization driving their thinking drives higher win rates. Other areas that one would expect is demonstrating superior value in both the solution and how we engage the customer in their buying process drive higher win rates. Giving customers new ideas, helping them improve their business drives both win rates and customer loyalty (derived from Gartner Research). But we’ve found one […]
“We Chose The Vendor With The Most Complete Solution”
I just read a report, “The Mood Of The B2B Buyer.” The results weren’t surprising, reinforcing most of the other research I see. There was one piece that provoked me to reflect. It was the response to the question, “In what circumstance might you opt for a more expensive solution to address a specific business need or pain point?” 53% of the respondents said, “If the vendor had a more complete solution.” It’s not at all surprising, but I can imagine thousands of marketers, sales enablement, and sales professionals salivating at that statement. I can just see how the majority […]
Are “Traditional” Selling Skills Even Relevant Anymore?
Categorize this post as “thinking out loud.” I’m not sure what I think about this issue, so I’m using the post to help me think through it and to get your input and ideas. We all know the story—buying has changed profoundly, complex buying is chaotic, we need to be customer focused/driven, we need to create value in every interaction….. At the same time, customers have many more sources/channels for information to help in their buying decisions, AI/ML technologies will make many transactional sales roles less necessary (tough this isn’t new news). And we have the convergence of information overwhelm, […]
Stopping Our Metrics Obsession!
Metrics are important. They provide a means of helping us understand whether we are on target to achieving our goals. They also give us insight into potential changes in the market. As we “instrument” more of the selling process, whether through CRM, mobile tools, and other means, we have the capability of measuring many more things than we have in the past. Recently, I was doing some reading on metrics. One group recommended tracking the following: Meetings/Opportunity, Time between touches, Opportunity conversion, Untouched opportunities, Contacts per account, Follow up meeting ratio, Opportunity progression, Email engagement rate, Total opportunities engaged, New […]