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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
Context, The Ultimate Sales Differentiator
Everyone is enthralled with content these day–Thankfully! Content’s not new, just most of the content generated sucks. We have data sheet after data sheet, millions spent in brochures. Of course there’s always the standard corporate presentation, with the ever so important logo’s slide. It’s usually the second or third slide and it really is a “brag slide,” “here are all the wonderful customers that bought from us…” Fortunately, leading marketing and sales enablement folks are moving content into a new realm. They are “customerizing” it, perhaps even humanizing it. It’s targeted to personas, it’s targeted to markets and industries, it […]
“The Modern Buyer Is Digitally Driven, Socially Connected…..”
There’s no doubt digital technologies and social media are changing the way we live, engage, and do business. Their influence is huge and the growth rate continues to accelerate. I read all the stuff that says everything’s moved to the web. I don’t disagree, but I don’t agree. Some would have you believe all we need to do is spend our time on the web, leveraging social sites and tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tinder (oops) and others. We’re inundated with words liked Digitally Driven, Socially Connected…. Out of curiosity, I decided to try to figure out what that really […]
Moving Into Our “Discomfort Zones”
As sales people, we get frustrated with customers that are slow, reluctant, resistant to change. We want them to embrace change, moving forward; because moving forward presents us an opportunity to sell. But turn the mirror on ourselves, and we are as reluctant as everyone else to change. We cling to what we have always done, we resist, we stay rigidly entrenched in our comfort zones. Even when nothing is working! We may do what we have always done with greater intensity. We may wrap a veneer of the latest technology around it, not enabling us to improve, but rather […]
The Data On Sales Success Is In!
We’ve run across some startling data on sales performance: 99% of sales reps making quota pee at least once a day! 98% of sales reps who show up for work on a regular basis are more likely to makes quota than those who never show up for work! 96% of sales people making quota, brush their teeth at least once a week. From these startling pieces of data, clearly the secret to sales success is peeing at least once a day, showing up for work, and brushing your teeth at least once a week (sorry we didn’t test daily brushing, […]
The Killer Closing Technique
Sales people continually looking for the killer close. Somehow, there has to be something the sales person can say or do which causes the customer to immediately issue a PO. Through my career, I’ve been “taught” and subjected to 100’s of different closes. The assumptive close, the puppy dog close, the limited time close, and the list goes on and on and on. As a customer, I think the best response these techniques have ever elicited is a quiet groan and eyeroll. Usually, these techniques evoke an internal reacion, “I’ll buy when I’m damn ready to buy and from who […]
You Can’t Have Pipeline Integrity Without Deal Integrity…..
Actually, the title of this post should be: You Can’t Have Pipeline Integrity Without Deal Integrity; You Can’t Have Deal Integrity Without A Sales Process People Use! But it was too long. This is one of those “hip bone is connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone is connected to …….” posts. Sales managers seem to be obsessed with pipeline reviews. They tend to take precedence over deal reviews or anything else. To some degree, this makes sense. After all, sales managers are focused on making the number, and the pipeline is the key indicator for making the numbers. […]