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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
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 […]
Little Things Add Up
It was 9:25 am, I was getting upset. The meeting had been called to start at 9:00 am. It was an important meeting. We were finalizing recommendations for a project and preparing for an executive review. At 9:25 about 70% of the required participants were in their seats. They were tinkering with email, catching up with each other. At 9:35 we decided to start, not everyone we needed was there. We had sent messages reminding, pleading, demanding they show up. But we had wasted enough time. By 10:00 everyone that needed to be in the room was there. The few […]
Invest In Training Your Sales People Every Day! A Conversation With Tory Hornsby
Would you invest in training your sales people for 45 minutes every day? The reaction of most sales managers would be “Hell No! That’s at least 10% of their productive time, I need them out selling!” My friend Tory Hornsby, COO of Sharpshooter Marketing and Powersports Marketing, has quite a different response. He would say, “I can’t afford not to!” Tory and his sales management team take the entire sales team through 45 minutes of training every day! They start their mornings with a meeting dedicated to celebrating what people have accomplished and developing new skills. Each day, has a […]