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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
Sales Isn’t Dying, We’re Killing It Ourselves!
Long time readers will be surprised. I’ve raged against the posts predicting the death of sales. I’ve shifted my views, we are killing ourselves! The issue isn’t whether our customers no longer need sales people. They are hungry for information, more importantly they are starved for help! Our customers’ worlds are increasingly complex. They are overworked and overwhelmed. They face challenges they’ve never encountered before. Many don’t even recognize they could be doing better or that they are missing opportunities. They want to learn and improve. They want our help! Sales people should be filling that important role as change […]
If You Don’t Understand Your Numbers, You Don’t Know How To Improve Performance
Sales and marketing are data/numbers driven, at least they should be and sometimes we pretend they are. But too often, sales people and managers don’t really understand the data/numbers. Some of you are probably thinking, “Dave you are really off base here, of course we understand them, we know we have to make our numbers!” Too often, however, we aren’t looking at the right data/numbers or we aren’t looking at them in the right way. Conversations sometimes go like this: Me: “What do you have to do to make your $5M goal?” Salesperson: “I got to sell a lot of […]
It Ain’t Easy, Those Days Are Long Past!
Sales isn’t easy! If it was, it could be totally automated and our customers and companies wouldn’t need sales people. We continue to see those parts of selling carved away, with more effective and efficient channels being leveraged—as they should be! We don’t create value in those areas, we only create cost—for our customers and our companies. While everyone, from the entry level sales person to top sales executives, readily acknowledge the complexities and challenges our customers face and the complexity and challenges we face on engaging them, what I continue to see is people and organizations pursuing the easy […]
Not Knowing What We Don’t Know
Too often, both our work and that of our customers focuses on learning or knowing what we don’t know. We know customers do much of their research digitally–according to research they may be 57-90% through their buying process and 94% of customers do some level of digital research or self education (I think it should be 100%). For example, if I want to improve my email marketing, all I have to do is type that into Google, and I get 12.7M results in 0.52 seconds. Possibly I want to leverage social selling effectively, I get 28.6M results in less than […]
Are You Really Different?
We know the importance of differentiating ourselves in attempting to win business. We try to do this at our web sites, often posting comparisons and charts showing how we have more features and functions than the alternatives. Too often, we think differentiation is about checking more feature boxes, having a richer product, than the competition. Web sites are filled with pages of, “Our Value Proposition.” Only when you compare competitors side by side, they say the same things—we improve your results, reduce your costs, improve quality, Blah, Blah, Blah…… Sales people go through endless demos, showing the capabilities of their […]
Of Course Sales Is About Relationships!
I am fuming at one of the most amazingly naive posts about “the Death Of Sales.” Ironically it’s written by a sales leader at one of the leading Marketing and Sales Automation company. Even more ironically, the call to action at the end of his post is to recruit partners to sell his company’s products. And his products are focused on helping sales people become more effective! WTF!!!! He starts his article with the sentence, “Sales people are not necessary….” He claiming that it’s easy to claim that “relationships are the cornerstone of every sale,” and “there is no replacement […]