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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
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. […]
First Impressions
I got one of those calls today. Not dissimilar to some of the other calls I’ve described in past posts. The sales person called wanting to talk about sales performance management. I’m always interested in sales performance management and learning more, after all, the majority of Sales Manager Survival Guide is about sales performance management. The call started well, she introduced herself, the company, and wanted to talk about issues I had with sales performance in my company. I responded, “Actually, I don’t have issues. The team is doing very well, we’re ahead of plan……” She asked, “How do you […]
The Crisis In Sales Performance
Whatever way you look at it, we are facing a crisis in sales performance. The data is everywhere-quantitatively and qualitatively. Last week in Dreamforce 16, there was a lot of discussion about “time available for selling.” Data points being tossed around showed time available for selling plummeting–in most cases less than 30%, in many far less than that. In some of our own client work we are seeing ranges as low as 10-20%. CEB data shows as much of stalled/lost deals is do to internal organizational complexity. Stated differently, getting things done internally adversely impacts people’s ability to focus on […]
Are You Obsessing Over Your Front Line Managers?
There are endless discussions about sales people and their performance. Thousands of blog posts with hints, tips, instructions focused on sales people, whether SDR’s or Corporate Account Managers. Hundreds of books, thousands of webinars and training programs all focus on the sales person. Billions are spent every year in training and tools to help make sales people more effective, efficient, and productive. In some sense, this focus makes sense. It is these front line individuals that produce the results, it’s these people who are accountable for finding and closing deals at a level sufficient to make the business plan. But […]