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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
Why The “Why” Is Important
As sales people, we know the “why” is very important in probing our customers. “Why do they feel this way? Why do you do things this way? Why is this is a problem? Why wouldn’t they change? Why are they interested/not interested?” The “why” is important to your people and your own performance in the job. People wonder “Why?” Why do we have to use the sales process? Why do we have to be data entry clerks using CRM? Why is my quota set the way it is? Why is it so tough to get approvals to do something? Why […]
It’s Really Not About The Buying Process
As sales professionals (marketing too), for years we’ve always been pretty self centered. We’ve focused on what we want–selling something. We, me included, talk a lot about the selling process. In recent years, we’ve discovered that’s really unfashionable. We have to mask our true goal and be customer focused. So we’ve shifted our terminology to focus on the customer buying process. In politically correct circles, we talk about the buying process and engaging the customer in their buying process, perhaps even being prescriptive in their buying process. The intensity of focus and discussion has even made it THE CUSTOMER BUYING […]
It’s Not “Integrated Sales And Marketing,” It’s “Interleaved Sales And Marketing”
I’ve been pretty tough on content marketers and marketing in a couple of my recent posts, “Are They At 57% Yet,” and “Opportunities We Are Blind To.” Beyond that, there are hundreds of articles and discussions on Integrated Sales And Marketing. The discussions are powerful, the walls we erect between the functions, the fingers we point at each other are diminishing, albeit slowly. We are realizing we have shared goals and must work together to optimize our abilities to attract, communicate, engage, and connect with our customers. There have been dramatic shifts in the type and relevance of content we create. All […]
Should We Be Rethinking The Role Of SDR’s?
Recently, I’ve been on a bit of a rampage, rethinking how we identify and pursue opportunities. It started in “Are They At 57% Yet,” and continued with “Opportunities We Are Blind To.” In this post, I’m continuing on the same theme, but trying to look at how we deploy people to actually find these opportunities. I’m a terrific fan of the concept of SDR’s. It’s critical to build specialized skill to have high impact first engagements with customers. In most organizations, prospecting and finding enough opportunities is a critical problem, so applying specialized skills at the very front end of […]
You Can’t Go It Alone On Complex Deals!
You have a huge deal, it’s the biggest one you’ve ever had, it’s huge for your company. You and your company may not have done many of these types of deals before. Or the complexity of the deal will require you to do some special things (no I’m not talking about pricing). Inevitably, it’s complex, there are lots of twist and turns about the deal. You struggle to understand the buying team and engage with them. There’s tough competition. Whatever the situation, it’s not a slam dunk. It’s not a standard situation where you can pitch your product, create a […]
The Opportunities We Are Blind To
Content marketing is going to save the world! Customers will let their fingers do the digital walking, SEO, PPC and other techniques will enable those customers to find us, our marketing automation tools will capture and nurture those customers through their quest to learn, SDR’s will intercept them at just the right point and then we magically have a qualified opportunity. At least that’s what many would have you believe. If it produces enough qualified deals to achieve your growth goals, then I suppose, it’s not a bad strategy. But I wonder about all the opportunities we miss, all the […]