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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
“I won’t pay more than $X!”
We were doing a deal review. It was a big deal with a prestigious customer. Procurement was involved. As we discussed the deal, the sales person said: “Procurement thinks this is a good solution, but they aren’t willing to pay more than $X and we are a whole lot more at Y.” “Have you presented the business case to the procurement folks?” I asked. “We’ve talked about how much this improves productivity and reduces costs, we’ve provided some industry data….” replied the sales person. “But have you provided a specific business case to them?” I asked. “No, they’re stuck on […]
Getting The Cart Before The Horse, Sales Automation
Technology and automation can enable each of us to be much more efficient, and sometimes more impactful/effective. In our company, we couldn’t achieve what we do without our technology stack. In some ways, it’s an appendage we couldn’t manage to live without. Having said that, it’s not the technology that drives performance. Think about it for a moment. If it were the technology that drove performance, we wouldn’t see the disparity in performance from different companies using the same technology. If it were technology, one would see uplifts in performance of all organizations using the technology, but we don’t. Unfortunately, […]
Changing The Questions, Manager’s Version
I wrote, Changing The Questions, discussing how our questioning strategies tend to serve us, not help the customer think about their situations, what they are trying to achieve, and what they might learn. Turns out, managers are just as bad in the questions they ask sales people. (Perhaps, that’s why sales people are so bad.) Managers tend to ask questions that are helpful to them, but not to the sales people. For example: When is this deal closing? What value? Can you bring it in sooner? Can you bring it in at a higher value? Are you really sure this […]
Meet “Bob”
Meet “Bob,” Bob is the diagram below. I wish I could take credit for the brilliance underlying Bob, but the credit goes to one of my favorite clients, a top performing sales organization in the semiconductor industry. Bob is a discussion of virtually any type of business opportunity or challenge your customer faces. But it is probably very unfamiliar, because very few sales people assess their customers’ problems–and how they can help in this way. The problem is, this is the way business managers in all of your customers assess their problems. The red represents financial losses of some sort. […]
What Are The Consequences Of Doing Nothing?
What are the consequences of doing nothing/not changing? The answer to this question is the single most important issue in every sales opportunity. Yet, when I ask this question in deal reviews, fewer than 5% of sales people can respond. If the customer can’t identify, independently or with our help, the consequences of not changing, not taking action, not moving forward, they have no need to buy! We still have a need to sell, and, too often, we continue to pester the customer in our efforts to sell them. Regardless how much we do, how much time we rob from […]
Too Busy To Do What We Know Is Right!
The sales team knew the sales process helped improve the results they produced–they had tested it, they’d seen profound improvements in result, but they weren’t using it. They struggled to produce results. The manager knew he was supposed to coach his people. He knew that coaching was the most effective way to improve performance and drive results. But instead, he jumped in to “save deals,” and dictated next steps to the sales people. His team’s performance wasn’t consistent, consequently always in crisis. The manager knew that he was undisciplined in managing his time. He knew he needed to prioritize and […]