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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 Buyer’s Journey, One Step At A Time
Most sales people focus on the outcome of the deal. They want to get to the close and an order as fast as possible. Managers constantly reinforce this rush to completion in their “coaching conversations,” by asking, “When are we going to get this deal?” or “We need this to close this quarter!” Everything we do is focused on jumping to the end of the buying process. We start pitching our solution before we even understand what the customer is trying to achieve. We try to present the value the customer might get, before we understand what the customer values. […]
Doing What We’ve Always Done, When Everything Else Has Changed
I’m constantly amazed conversations I have with otherwise smart people. Usually, they start with some sort of challenge they are having: We aren’t growing at the rate we need to grow. We aren’t hitting out numbers. The markets have changed dramatically. Our competition has changed. Our customers are changing. Our budgets are smaller, we don’t have the resources we used to. There are number of issues people identify. Once they have done that, I ask, “What are you doing about those things?” Usually, there’s a long pause in the conversation. Sometimes people say: We’ve upped the pressure on our people […]
Transactional Versus Complex Selling
We glibly toss around phrases like “We have a transactional selling process,” or, “Ours is a complex selling process.” Often, there is some preening around those making the latter statement, thinking “Real sales people do complex deals!” Recently, I lurked in a conversation, suddenly realizing, while we glibly talk about these types of selling processes, there’s a lot of misunderstanding of them. There are probably a lot of valid definitions, but I’ll try to toss out my perspective with some thoughts. Too often we try to distinguish transactional and complex by average deal size, thinking transactional deals are much smaller […]
Why Are You Calling Now?
This morning, I’m doing work in a rare day in the office. A sales person calls. He’s actually pretty interesting, but I pause him mid-pitch, asking, “What caused you to call me now? Is there something that caused you to think it’s critical for us to talk about the issue this week, versus in 6-9 months.” I have to credit the sales person, he was at least honest with me, “Your company is on my call list for today, but I don’t know what you might be interested in…..” We know why we, as sales people, want to call people […]
Just Because We’re In Your ICP Doesn’t Mean I Have A Need To Buy!
I wrote about how badly too many sales people conduct discovery with their customer: Are You Guilty Of Conducting “Non-Discovery?” It’s useful to expand on that initial post. We know the importance of focusing your prospecting and pipeline development efforts on people and companies fitting your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). These are the customers who are most likely to have the problems/challenges that our solutions address. Trying to find opportunities outside the ICP is a pure waste of time–unfortunately too many sales people are glad to waste their time in this way. But just because you are focusing on customers […]
Are You Guilty Of Conducting “Non-Discovery?”
We all know the importance of conducting discovery calls. In principle, a discovery call is to help us learn more about the customer, their needs, problems, dreams, and goals. Once we “discover” these, we can determine whether the customer has a need that we can address, we can assess the urgency and interest the customer might have in addressing those needs. But there’s something lacking in the majority of the discovery calls I see. There are the standard questions, to which there are always the standard answers: “Of course I’m interested in growing my business and revenue, of course I’m […]