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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
When Prospects Don’t Follow The Script
I have a confession. For some reason, I take perverse pleasure in taking sales people off script. Yes, I do it purposefully, but not maliciously. I suppose I should be ashamed with playing with these hapless souls, but I’m not. But before you start thinking poorly of me, the questions or responses I provide aren’t unreasonable. These sales people are just ill prepared to engage in a conversation. For example, a few months ago, a sales person calls me (yes, I had just downloaded a white paper). After the introduction, he said, “I can help grow your business by 200% […]
“Good Enough” Should Never Be “Good Enough”
I’ve been involved in a fascinating conversation with Greg Michaels. He wrote a great article, Regarding The “Challenger Customer.” Taking “Good Enough” Away From The Sales Table. He piqued my interest and we’ve been communicating and debating about it for days. We all, our customers and we “settle.” Whether we get so busy, are blind, arrogant, complacent, or just tired, we tend to settle. We deal with frustrations, ultimately becoming blind to them. In reality, Good Enough is devastating. Good Enough focuses us on the past and the present. What worked brilliantly yesterday, is OK today, but what about tomorrow? One thing […]
Does Your View Of Value Limit You And Your Customers?
Value is one of those $25 words everyone talks about. We all want to talk about our value and value propositions. But we have huge variations in the way we interpret value and the way our customers interpret value. Value in it’s simplest form is price. Unfortunately, that’s where the majority of sales people compete. They provide the customer with their best price, crossing their fingers, hoping to win. The customer is left with the challenge of which alternative to choose. Since, inevitably, all the alternative will meet their requirements, the only differentiator becomes the vendor offering the lowest price. […]
The Brave New World Of Buying Automation
There was a hilarious article in the New York Times, A Robot That Has Fun At Telemarketing’s Expense. It got me to thinking about the future of buying and selling. The sales and marketing automation markets are among the hottest SaaS markets around. Each year, 1000’s of new suppliers of software solutions emerge. Collectively the markets are expected to generate 10’s of billions of revenues. All of this supposedly oriented at making sales and marketers more efficient and effective. We are drowning in the output of these tools. We are drowning in emails, most of which are irrelevant. While the […]
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 […]