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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
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 […]
The Customer Journey, Is It Really That Predictable?
I saw the Princeton Marching Band for the first time in the early 80’s. I was working in Manhattan, a few of my colleagues were Princeton grads, so every once in a while, we’d take the train to Princeton to watch a football game–and the “memorable” Princeton Marching Band. Take a few minutes to watch this video, contrasting Lehigh and Princeton. Lehigh is first, very disciplined and orderly. If you want to skip to just past the mid point, you’ll see Princeton (just past 7 minutes). They’re chaotic, they’re all over the place. It’s sheer comedy to see them try […]
Sales Manager—Business Manager Or Coach?
The responsibilities of a sales manager are very broad. Frontline managers have to work to make sure each person on the team is performing at the highest levels possible. They have to provide the coaching, training, systems, processes, tools, and support to enable their people to achieve their goals. At the same time, there’s the “business management” aspect of the job: Are we going to make our numbers? Are we managing our budgets effectively? What’s the forecast? How do we improve effectiveness and efficiency? What are risks and threats we face in competing, what must we do to overcome them? […]