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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
“Sell What You Use, Use What You Sell!”
I have to admit, this post is targeted primarily to vendors of Sales/Marketing tools, services, and consulting. I guess being a consultant in this space makes me a target for more than my fair share of poorly thought out marketing and sales approaches. Frankly, I think any person with sales, marketing, business development in their job title gets inundated with the same crap I have to wade through daily. To make my point, I have to step back to the 80’s At the time, I was an executive in the Manufacturing Industry segment of IBM. We had responsibility to sell […]
The Customer Buying Process Is Not About You Or Your Competition!
I’m tempted to paraphrase the old Carly Simon song, You’re So Vain. Too often we think our customers’ buying cycles are about us, at least a choice between us and our competitors. We may be very customer focused in our sales process, trying to understand and align ourselves with the customer buying process. But still, our strategies tend to focus on a singular part of the customer buying cycle, “What does it take to select us?” As a consequence, everything we do, probably everything our competitors do is singularly focused on that one decision. But looking at it from a […]
Sales And The Zombie Apocalypse
Recently, I was having a conversation with Robert Racine about the state of sales management. During the discussion, he mentioned, almost in passing, that too many Sales Managers are becoming Zombies–that is acting purely on autopilot, rather than thinking, evaluating, engaging. As I reflected on the conversation, I realized this trend isn’t limited to sales managers, but is extending to the entire organization. It’s somewhat ironic, many sales people love the job because of the freedom, the challenge of figuring things out, the creativity of engaging customers to help them recognize and solve their problems, and the rush of winning […]
If Your Customer Doesn’t Have Problems, They Don’t Need You!
The only reason sales people exist is to help customers solve their problems, grow, and improve. The corollary is, if the customer doesn’t have the problems you can solve, they don’t need you! But, judging by most of the prospecting calls I get, and most I observe with sales people, too many sales people fail to recognize this. Too often, sales people call blindly, reaching out to anyone, any company, any name on their list. Inevitably, they start their conversations with, “I’d like to tell you about my company and our solutions…….” Too often, sales people don’t focus their efforts […]
“Pissing On The Ashes”
A colleague had a wonderfully colorful term to describe situations we both found ourselves in. We were both senior executives in a large corporation. Often, we found ourselves on the phone with desperate sales people. A deal was about to close and they were worried about losing it. They were pulling out all the stops, trying to win the deal at the last moment. By that time they were so desperate, they would call on anyone for help–often it ended up being either Jerry or myself. Jerry called these, “Pissing on the ashes” calls. He likened it to a house […]
Rescuing Deals!
Each of us has experienced it, we’re struggling winning a deal. It’s an important one for us and for the company, we look for help from our managers and others. Instead of providing help, the managers sweeps in to save the day. They take the deal away, rescuing it, saving the day! Whether it’s a “Superman” complex, ego, or simply desperation, this practice is devastating. Usually, it doesn’t work. No amount of slick salesmanship can save a deal at the last moment, if we’ve made errors in the strategies we’ve executed and the work we have done with the customer. […]