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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
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 […]
Volume And Velocity—What’s Missing?
There’s a huge amount of discussion focusing on Volume And Velocity in sales. SaaS companies trying to build traction and subscriptions person by person, department by department–at least until the confront the enterprise. Companies envying the growth of these companies are copying them, looking again for Volume And Velocity. We see endless research about the importance of speed in following up leads, minutes and second count–literally. The advantage goes to the first person to follow up a lead. The sales process is changed–but as it should, when we pursue individuals, or small departments, we are no longer looking at a […]
Do Your Sales People Understand The Objective Of Your Content?
The other day, I downloaded an outstanding market research study. It was entitled, 2016, The State Of Marketing. It’s a fascinating piece of work. The problem was that in downloading the paper, I immediately get emails and phone calls asking my interest in Marketing Automation Solutions — because that’s what this particular company sells. The problem with much of our prospecting or follow up on “leads,” is that it is completely disconnected from the content that generated the lead. It’s this disconnect, that actually hurts our abilities to prospect and engage the customer. It actually creates a negative reaction with […]