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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 Key To Success Is To Ask Only 4 Questions!
Customer can breath a huge sigh of relief. The data is in, it shows sales people ask far too many questions, boring or even angering executives for wasting their time. But research now shows the optimal number of discovery questions to ask is 4. Both, as a victim of too many meaningless discussions where someone is trying to sell something to me, and as an observer on thousands of sales calls, I know I can breathe a huge sigh of relief that “death by questioning,” will come to an end, as sales enablement professionals and sales managers recognize that “4 […]
Is There A “Schism” Between Sales Enablement And Sales?
Perhaps I’m an alarmist, but I’m starting to see the early signs of a schism between Sales Enablement and Sales. It’s displayed in a number of subtle, perhaps, unconscious ways—“us and them” in conversations rather than “we.” In other moments of either honesty or frustration, it is one organization saying, “We would be so much more successful, if it weren’t for ‘them.’” I want to be clear–I’ve heard this from both sales and sales enablement people, accusing the other. There are debates with strong positions on either side, “SE professionals should have carried a bag….” or “SE professionals require very […]
Solution Buying…….
Silly me, I always thought we were supposed to sell solutions. That is, as sales people, we were supposed to understand our customers and their businesses–not in the abstract, but very specifically. What are Christy’s goals, dreams? What is she accountable for? What issues stand in the way of her achieving these? What happens when she doesn’t achieve them? Likewise, I thought we were supposed to understand the customer’s businesses, again, not in the abstract, but very specifically. What are the goals/priorities of Christy’s managers, all the way up to the top of the company? How is the company doing […]
Beware Of Sales Enablement Experts Prospecting
Every day, each of us gets dozens of horrendously bad prospecting emails. My friend, Hank Barnes, of Gartner has made a regular #FridayFails series featuring his worst of the week. Fortunately, spam filters take care of most of them, but some filter through anyway. I’ve limited my writing about these–there’s just too much bad material that it gets repetitive. But I can’t refrain from writing about a certain category of prospecting letters. It’s those written by self proclaimed experts in sales, marketing, sales enablement, prospecting, content. I write about these for several reasons. First, even people who know better do […]
Buyer Efficiency
There are thousands of posts, hundreds of tools, hundreds of books focusing on “sales efficiency.” Sales efficiency is important. We want our people to accomplish as much as possible in as little time as possible. (As a side note, focusing on sales efficiency without first focusing on sales effectiveness will do nothing more than creating crap at the speed of light.) The problem with the exclusive focus on sales efficiency, is that it focuses on us, what we do, and how we do it. But it ignores the customer–ironically, much of what we do to be efficient, makes the buyer […]
We Have To Have The Courage To Let Our People Do Their Jobs!
Too often, as managers, we get in the way of our people doing their jobs–either purposefully/intrusively, accidentally, being well-intentioned, or through inattention. Whichever way this manifests itself, it stands in the way of us doing our jobs–that is to maximize the performance of each person on our team. Failing to do this, means we don’t achieve our goals in the short or long term. We can’t do our people’s jobs–the numbers go against us. We do them, our companies, a disservice if we don’t enable them, hold them accountable, and let them do their jobs. But too often we don’t […]