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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 Power Of Time Blocking
In a conversation with a sales manager, he was struggling with the performance of his people. They were making their numbers–kinda/sortof–it was actually spotty, some months were great, some months were awful, everything evened out over time. The challenge was, a lack of consistency within the team and from month to month. We started talking about activity levels. He said the people always seemed to be busy. I asked, “What are they doing?” He really didn’t know, but had a general impression of “busyness.” Fortunately they had a shared calendar system. I asked him to show me the calendars for […]
All Customers Aren’t Alike
“Well Duuugggh Dave! Thanks for that stunning insight!?!” OK, now that you’ve gotten that out of your systems, let me dive into what I mean. Let’s imagine we have done our homework. We are treating customers as a homogenous group, we are segmenting our customers based on industry and markets. We may be segmenting customers based on size (Global, Enterprise, SMB, Consumer). We may further be segmenting the buyers within enterprises by persona. We’ve done our homework, we have content, marketing, and sales programs aligned to these segments. We prospect within a segment–but still aren’t connecting with customers as effectively […]
Are Your Sales People “Organizationally Savvy?”
Clearly we live in worlds of increasing complexity. The issues our customers and our own organizations deal with are increasingly complex. The problems and challenges our customers face are not trivial. Our solutions and products are increasing in breadth and scope. The rate of change, both self generated and externally imposed, seems to be accelerating. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to get things done! Both with our customers and within our own organizations. CEB data shows the number of decisionmakers involved in making complex B2B decisions has grown from 5.4 to 6.8. And those decisionmakers represent at least 3 functions in […]
Hunters In Major Accounts?
Recently, I’ve been having a number of discussions on account based strategies, major/global account coverage. To be honest, I’m stunned with some of the thinking about growing account based businesses. Most of the thinking is dominated by retention strategies. Keeping the customer, if you have a subscription type of offering, getting the renewal. Wrapped around this is some notion of upsell/cross sell, “Can we expand the relationship with the current customer (individuals)?” Speaking with one colleague, he observed that too many organizations are focused on just “protecting” the current base, they are afraid of disrupting the relationship with the customer […]
Are You Selling What Your Customer Is Buying?
I’ll jump to the bottom line, then retrace my steps. “Customer buy holes in walls, not drills.” Actually, they may not be buying holes in walls, they may actually be looking to attach something to the wall….. Yeah, I know you’ve heard that old maxim or a variant for years, possibly decades. Perhaps the reason the saying is constantly resurrected is we are constantly forgetting it. Take a moment and reflect on the last dozen prospecting calls or emails you received. What were they about? Probably 80% of the legitimate ones (not those in your SPAM filter) were about a […]
Encountering Resistance
My friend, Charles Green, wrote a stunning article: Is Selling Too Hard, Maybe You’re Doing It Wrong. Make sure you read it. His article caused me to start thinking about Resistance. We all encounter resistance from our customers, it seems the harder we push, the greater the customer’s resistance (for those students of physics, you will recognize the commercial application of Newton’s Third Law of Mechanics). The more we want to sell, the more we want to reach out to pitch our products, the more it seems they resist. We try everything we can–inundating them with emails, constant prospecting calls. […]