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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
Inbound Works—Until It Doesn’t
I’m a great fan of inbound marketing/demand gen approaches. What sales person wouldn’t be? It’s great to be able to talk to someone who actually is interested in your products and services! Before the first conversation, you have a context of their interests. You know marketing programs they’ve responded to, you know the content, which provides an indication of their interest. If you do your homework, quickly researching them and their company, you can engage them in meaningful conversations about their problems and challenges. Some will have a need to buy, we qualify them move them into the pipeline and […]
Complex Or Simple Buying Process
Over the past few months, I’ve been reviewing a lot of my thinking about business to business buying and selling processes, and how we achieve success in both. I’m not sure I’ve changed any of my position, but perhaps clarified some of my thinking. Hope you don’t mind my “thinking aloud.” First, probably some definitions are in order, so we are at least on the same page. When I refer to the complex buying process, or the complex selling process, it’s typically one involving many people in the decision-making process, typically a consensus driven decision by the “5.4” or however […]
Rethinking The Sales Organization
In the “old days” the structure of the sales organization was pretty simple. Hire a bunch of people, give them territories with goals and turn them loose to sell. There were variations of that theme, sometimes we used indirect sales organizations, like manufacturer’s reps, resellers, channel partners, and others to sell for us. Sometimes all the selling was done over the phone. Sometimes the territory was geographically defined, sometimes it was industry/segment defined, sometimes it was defined by accounts. But the model was pretty simple. A sales person had a territory and was responsible for selling all the company’s products […]
We Don’t Need No Stinkin Sales People!
I’m amazed by the number of CEO’s I speak with that don’t want to have sales people. Most of them do have sales people–begrudgingly. But because of their attitudes, their sales organizations suffer, reinforcing the CEO’s perspective that sales people are worthless. These are otherwise smart, even brilliant business executives, who don’t like or don’t believe in the function of sales. In many cases, it’s deeply and emotionally held–they can’t explain it. When you try to discuss it, you can have “logical discussions,” but in trying to invest further, build or grow a sales capability, everything in them cries out […]
Prescriptive Selling
I’m seeing a trend toward increasing prescription in selling. By that, I mean marketing, sales enablement, or management are prescribing the activities, actions, scripts, conversations their people should be having. Many of the new technologies seem very focused at providing prescriptive guidance to the conversations sales people have with prospects and customers. At it’s simplest level, it is “Do this, Don’t do that….” At much higher levels, there are very richly scripted conversations–which must be working at some level, otherwise why would they be so popular. Most of the situations I see these applied to are transactional types of buying, […]
Tag, You’re It!
All of us probably remember a game from our childhoods, “Tag.” One person would be named the “Tagger,” or I suppose, “It.” The tagger would chase someone else around until she reached him and Tagged him, yelling “Tag, You’re It.” The responsibility for “Tagging” shifted and the new Tagger tried to find another victim, passing the responsibilities from person to person to person. Sometimes, I think our customers may feel like they are in a special game of “Tag,” being passed from SDR/BDR, to sales person to demoer, to sales specialist, to closer (I’m hearing some talk of organizational designs […]