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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
Social Networking Annoyances
Every day, I get dozens of connection requests through all sorts of channels. Early on, as I was building my networks, I didn’t scrutinize the requests very closely. If someone seemed nominally interesting, I was glad to connect. Over time, I’ve become much more careful, primarily because accepting many requests opens a flood gate of unwanted emails, phone calls, and meaningless solicitations. I’ve started developing these rough screening rules, but have a lot to learn, so I’d love to hear your tips I connect with people: Somehow, I get a lot of requests from “companies.” I don’t know how to […]
Sales Management Isn’t Simple!
Being a top performing sales manager or executive isn’t an easy job. Sales managers live in a world of constantly shifting priorities, crises, and challenges. Simultaneously, sales leaders must balance their responsibility in executing the company strategy in the markets and with customers. They must respond to constant shifts in markets and ever changing buyer and competitive demands. They must make sure their organization is prepared not only for today’s challenges, but for changes they know will come. They have to maximize the performance of the organization–in the face of few resources, less funding, increasing expectations and no time. Even […]
“We Can’t Justify Your Price……”
We were debriefing a closing call. Bill’s solution had been selected. Bill had done a great job in competing and in justifying the value of his solution. There was a strong business case demonstrating tremendous improvements in productivity. In this case, the customer was growing faster than their ability to bring people on board supporting the growth. Bill’s solution enabled the customer to support their anticipated growth with their current workforce. As a result the business case was stunning. The customer could capture revenue they would otherwise forego, and they were doing it on a much lower cost basis than they […]
Are You Aligned With Where Your Customer Is In Their Buying Process?
A friend called me for advice today. He’s a great sales person, a big deal hunter. He wanted to review a deal strategy and call plan he was making on a CTO at a very large, fast growing prospect. His colleagues had been working with the CTO’s team. By far, they were the front runners for their first piece of business with this customer. By itself, it was a big order, but his colleagues saw a lot more potential in the account. That’s why they got my friend, let’s call him “John,” involved. Reviewing the account, their growth, their requirements, […]
Provocation Or Obnoxiousness?
The concept of provoking our customers, getting them to think about their businesses differently is a key element of providing insights. Paraphrasing Brent Adamson, to help our customers “unlearn” we have to show them what they are currently doing may be wrong. That is, there may be different ways of operating that will produce superior results, or there may be opportunities they are missing. It’s a powerful concept. But it’s one that requires deep knowledge about the customer, their operations, their markets/customers, and their competition. It’s not something that can be pulled off without having a strong basis of credibility and […]
“Are You The Decisionmaker?”
I was reading a sales blog post on critical questions to ask the customer. One that jumped out to me was the advice to make sure you ask, “Are you the decisionmaker?” Perhaps I’m being too nit-picky, but it seems to be a terrible question. As I reread it, I thought, what do we learn from the response to the question? First the response can only be “Yes,” or “No.” (I thought it was conventional wisdom that open ended questions tend to elicit more information than closed ended questions.) We really learn very little from the response to this question, […]