Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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 Questions Sales People Ask?
Questioning is critical for sales people. Every sales training program focuses on the importance of questioning. We ask questions to qualify. We ask questions to understand need. We ask questions to learn requirements. We ask questions to understand alternatives the customer is considering. We ask questions about the decision making process. We ask questions to assess customer understanding/knowledge of our products. We ask questions to understand their perception of our proposed solution. We even have questions we ask to close. To help sales people, we develop endless playbooks, battlecards, and scripts with questions they have to ask. But too often, […]
On Differentiation
Differentiation is critical in helping customers select our solution over the alternatives. As important as it is, most sales people do a terrible job at differentiation. Ultimately, too many are unable to differentiate in meaningful ways, as a result they end up differentiating on price. Every time we win by taking pricing actions, we are telegraphing and reinforcing, “There is really no reason to buy our products/services other than we are the cheapest alternative available.” Over time, these actions train both our customers and sales people that we are no better and no worse than any other alternative–and that we […]
Technology Only Gets Us So Far
I’m a great fan of much of many sales technologies. There are tools that dramatically improve efficiency. These allow us to get more accomplished, more easily and in less time. There are tools that give us greater insight into the customer–both the enterprise and individual. We can leverage customer searches of our sites, the materials they have downloaded, and communications they may have had to give us better insight into their interests. AI and related tools deepen those insights and help us better determine the timing of when a customer might be interested in a conversation. These tools can even […]
Hearing What We Don’t Want To Hear Is Critical
It seems, as human beings, we are increasingly less open to hearing differing points of view. We immediately reject those that have a different opinion or world view, not taking the time to understand it, learn/evaluate, perhaps challenge it, or perhaps even shifting our own opinions as we learn more. We seek those that share our points of view, continually reinforcing what we want to hear, exposing ourselves less and less to other thinking. We isolate ourselves to tribal thinking, discounting anything that is outside of the tribal view. Technology is here to help us, it watches our browsing habits, […]
The Unintended Consequences Of “Making It About The Numbers”
I wrote, The Number Are, Well, Just Numbers. It stirred up a lot of discussion and one observation from Gordon Hogg, was both amusing and illuminating: “It’s the Cobra Effect! India’s colonial governor put a bounty on cobras to stop snake bites. Dead cobras came in but snake bites persisted. People started breeding cobras to kill for the bounty.” I don’t know it it’s a true story, but it points out the unintended consequences of some of the metrics we put in place. We have to think about, “What behaviors are we driving–are those the behaviors we really want to […]
The Numbers Are, Well, Just Numbers….
Business people, particularly sales, are obsessed with numbers. We measure everything, we scorecard everything. Revenue, orders, growth, margin, share, performance against plan, performance against prior periods, pipeline metrics, calls made, meetings held, demos conducted, proposals submitted, wins/losses, expenses/budget, CPOD, people hired, turnover (voluntary/involuntary), performance in customers (e.g. major accounts), performance in market sectors, performance by product line, performance in geographic region/territory, customer satisfaction/NPS, customer acquisition cost, new customer acquisition, retention, churn, renewal, open rates, click throughs, forwards, bounce rates…… Differing segments have specialized terminology for many of these metrics. For example XaaS oriented businesses have a propensity to endless acronyms […]