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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
Sell The Vision, It’s Easier Than Selling The Product!
I’ve never sold a computer or licensed software in my career. I’ve never sold consulting services in my career. Frankly, it’s really difficult selling those things. Take licensed or even SaaS software products. You have to know about things like GUI’s, software architectures, installation, coding, memory utilization, caching, pipelining, and all sorts of little details. You have to be able to discuss each transaction and how each operation works, and why you chose to implement things the way you have—and why it’s superior to other approaches. To be effective, you have to know your competition’s products as well. You have to understand […]
Buyer Self Sufficiency
I read a fascinating HBR Article, “How More Accessible Information Is Forcing B2B Sales To Adapt.” It’s a great article by authors I deeply respect. It’s a relatively sophisticated discussion of the digitally savvy buyer, and the increasing trend of “buyer self sufficiency.” It both reinforces, “Buyers are 57-50% through their buying process before they want to see sales people,” but also acknowledges various levels of buyer self sufficiency and their willingness to engage sales people earlier, based on lower self sufficiency or different needs. As I read and re-read the article, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the concept of […]
Can Your Sales People Lead A Business Conversation?
The role of sales has clearly changed. We no longer have to spend our time educating customers about our products and solutions. Beside, too often, they really don’t care about our products and their capabilities. If we can’t talk to them about our solutions, then what’s left? What do we talk to them about? I guess, we have to focus on what interests them. Their jobs, roles, goals, aspirations. We need to talk about their challenges, opportunities, problems they may be having. We need to talk about their customers, their competition, their industry — and their potential impact on the […]
93.2353% Of Plan
As I write this post, I’m 93.2353% toward a goal I set for all of us. It’s simply unacceptable for me not to meet plan, so I need your help. Many of you know that I’ve supported Charity:Water for a number of years. I started this year’s campaign about a week ago. In a very short time, through your generosity, we’ve raised $7925–so far. For those who’ve contributed, even just a few dollars, I can’t thank you enough. Already, we’ve raised enough money to provide water for several hundred people. This year, I set a several goals: I would match contributions […]
Numbers Make The Conversation More Interesting
Numbers are the bane of many sales people’s existence. Everyone wants to talk about numbers, but it’s far more fun and easy to talk about our cool products, the flashy features, and all the bells and whistles. Or in conversations with our managers, it’s easier to talk about all the stuff we are doing, or the stuff the customer isn’t doing, than to talk about the numbers. But let’s face it, numbers make the conversation more interesting—the right numbers! Numbers catch the attention of executives and decision makers, so if we aren’t comfortable talking about the numbers, we’re going to […]
Deal Slippage
It’s the end of the month, end of the quarter, end of the year….. I’m looking at the pipelines of several clients (sometimes, I think they regret giving me access to their CRM systems) and I see a flurry of activity. Yes some of it is deals coming in and being closed, but too much of it is slipping the target close date. Move it out a month, a quarter….. I look at the history of some of the deals, one has moved 11 times in the past 11 months, you guessed it, every month the sales person slips the […]