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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 Best Way To Sell Something……..”
Recently, I read a quote, “The best way to sell something, don’t sell anything. Earn the awareness, respect, and trust of those who might buy.” I suppose I get the idea, but somehow I think there is much more to selling, and our customers deserve more from us. Awareness, respect, trust are critical, but they are insufficient to drive customers to change or to buy. I understand what the person is trying to say. He’s suggests avoiding all the typical bad behaviors we see from sales people—always pitching, focused on their own goals rather than customer goals, leveraging manipulative behaviors […]
Selling Would Be So Easy If It Weren’t For Those Damn Customers!
For some weeks, I’ve been on the war path about emerging trends in sales. We see the same issues and trends in too many blog posts/books, at every conference, and in the social channels. The focus in much of our discussions on selling is about us–sales people. We see discussions focused on increasing specialization in sales–actually adaptations of the Toyota Production System. We have highly focused roles, each role focuses on it’s job in the sales process, once complete, the widget–I mean customer, is passed to the next function, then the next, then the next…..on down the sales assembly line. […]
Yeah, You’re Making Quota, Are You Doing Your Job?
Sales is responsible for executing the company strategy in the face of the customer. What’s this really mean? Let’s imagine you have two sales people, each with goals of $5M. The company they work for has two core product lines, each strategic to achieving their growth plan. Sales person A makes his numbers—but only selling his favorite product line , “C.” That’s where he has the most confidence, plus he can always make his goals focusing on product line C. Sales person B, also, makes her numbers, but her performance is balanced across product lines “C” and a newer, slightly […]
Sales People Don’t Message, They Have Conversations
I’ve spent the past couple of days at the TOPO Summit. It’s become one of 3 “must attend” conferences I go to every year. All the presenters are rock solid practitioners, with pragmatic advice. However, as I listened to many of the presenters and much of the conversation, there was one theme that disturbed me. People were constantly talking about how sales people should “message” more effectively. Perhaps, I’m guilty of wordsmithing, but sales people don’t message. They engage people in conversations. Marketing “messages,” as they should. The communications marketing provides is primarily one way, creating awareness, provoking interest, educating […]
Business Simplification–The Number 1 Job Of Sales Enablement
Most people talking about the Sales Enablement function agree the goal of Sales Enablement is to improve the productivity and overall performance of front line sales professionals. But after that, a lot of the discussion starts going a little haywire—at least to me. Usually, the discussion are around providing more to our sales team. They usually revolve around themes like: More and better training….. More and better content….. More and better tools….. More and better information about customers, competition, products, solution….. Ironically, sales people are drowning in “more!” We see time available for selling plummeting—primarily driven by internal distractions and […]
Relationships Are Secondary To Sales Effectiveness
I find myself in an unusual position. I’ve always been biased more to the science side of selling than the art side. I believe that selling is a disciplined process, that we can “engineer” those processes to increase our impact, customer engagement, and our effectiveness. I believe in sharp, rigorous execution of those processes in driving sales effectiveness and performance. Sales people promoting the old “Hail and Hearty,” sales is all about relationships and “when the going gets tough, the tough take a customer to lunch/golf,” have been somewhat abhorrent to me. But then, I’m a physicist/engineer by training–and somewhat […]