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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
Inside/Outside, Is It Even Relevant Anymore?
Sometimes I wonder about the discussions I hear about Inside versus Outside/Field/Direct sales. I suppose, at one point in time the distinction was relevant. Or at least it reinforced stereotypes of what we thought each was and the value they represent to the organization. In ancient times, when I started selling (the ’80’s), I started as a direct/field sales person. We were the people that “pushed big iron,” we did the multimillion dollar deals. Supposedly, we were out in the field everyday, in customers’ offices doing deals. We tended to think of inside sales as those people sitting in the […]
Doing More By Doing Less
It’s awfully crowded in the digital marketing/social selling world. Getting “heard” is increasingly difficult. Getting into see/talk to customers is one of the top challenges I hear from executives, marketing and sales people alike. To most, the solutions seem to be, “do more,” “be outrageous.” As a result our emails are filled with “provocative/attention grabbing headlines,” that we just ignore and delete. Afterall, with all their marketing automation tools and content expertise, 79% of emails sent by professional marketers have no or limited targeting. We are inundated with messages through every social channel. Content which was supposed to be a […]
Your Most Important Sales Call, What’s Your Plan?
Today, a reader reminded me about something I said in an Openview Partners article about 18 months ago. The article, 20 Of The Best Interview Questions For New Sales Hires, has great ideas from some very thoughtful people. I suggested the following: “Can you show me your plan for this interview?” It’s something I ask all the time, too often, I’m disappointed–they don’t have a plan. Sure, they are answering the questions, usually telling me how great and qualified they are. But very few have a plan for what they want to achieve in the meeting. Let me backtrack a […]
Customers Only See Their Part Of The Problem
In today’s complex B2B world, we know our customers struggle to solve their problems, along the way, perhaps searching for solutions to solve their problem From the Challenger Customer, we know roughly 5.4 people tend to be involved in the process and we know the majority of these initiative end in No Decision Made. As great consultative sales people, we work with each of the 5.4 to identify their needs, priorities, and requirements. We demonstrate how our solution will help address each of those, hopefully convincing them to favor our solution. Again, from the Challenger Customer, we know that doesn’t […]
You Want To Take My Money, But Who Are You?
Every day, it seems there is a new sales, marketing, customer service tool popping up on the web. I explore lots of them, many look very promising. All of them want me to “buy,” it’s a subscription of some type. The subscription price may be something as simple as my email address. But my email address has tremendous value, so I want to be cautious in how I invest it. My email gives you access to my most precious commodity, my time. Some actually are asking for money, albeit what seems to be a fair price, one that I’m willing […]
Customer Stuck? Not Moving Forward?
It’s a common lament among sales people, “I’m trying to close the customer, I can’t get them to move forward! They’re dragging their feet, they just won’t order!” Last week, with several clients, I was doing pipeline reviews. Too many sales people were saying this, slipping their forecasts, slipping their target close dates another month (one becomes suspicious when you see 11 sequential monthly slips on a deal–but I’ll leave that for another post). How do we get them to move forward? Recently, I saw some horribly bad advice on this. Frankly, I thought these techniques had gone out with […]