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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
Hacking Sales Management
I’ve been writing a short series on Hacking Selling–(Hacking Selling, Hacking Selling Part 2). As with the prior articles, I get huge numbers of requests from sales manager to help Hack their jobs. “What are the short cuts?” “How do I manage my time better?” “How do I get things done more easily?” As with the other articles, most of the hacks are very well known. Every year there are hundreds to thousands of articles about them, there’s lots of data that speaks to the impact these hacks have. Yet, somehow, too many people don’t use them–for reasons that are […]
Hacking Selling Part 2
As I mentioned in Hacking Selling, sales people and managers constantly ask me for short cuts. They are looking at ways to make selling easier, ways to help them win more business. In Hacking Selling, I said the easiest way to do this is to hack the customer’s business, focusing on what they need, rather than what we sell. I got a lot of messages on the post. People wanted more short cuts, so I’ve put together a list for sales people. I’ll follow this with another post for sales managers. Most of these hacks have been around a long […]
When All Else Is Equal, The Lowest Price Wins!
When the customer perceives little difference between alternative solutions from vendors, the lowest price wins! And that’s how it should be, it would be insane for the customer to do anything else. Now before you start leaping to conclusions thinking that I’m promoting rampant discounting to win business, let me clarify things. Too often, we fail to differentiate our solutions and value in meaningful ways. As the customer compares both our offerings and their buying experience with other alternatives, it’s difficult for them to find any meaningful differentiation. As a result, the only substantive differentiation is pricing. So when the […]
My Favorite Sales Enablement Tools
Sales Enablement tools are Hot! Developing and offering sales enablement tools is a multibillion dollar industry. It seems every week I get at least one email of a tool that is intended to help improve the effectiveness of sales people, managers, or anyone involved in sales. Some are quite broad in scope, some are very focused–helping us do one thing much better. The developers of the tools offer great case studies and research about how the tools help sales people. Most of the companies I talk to are investing millions in buying sales enablement tools. I haven’t seen the […]
Hacking Selling
Every day I get emails and messages from sales people trying to “Hack Selling.” They ask me, “Is there an easy way to catch the attention of a customer and get a meeting?” “Is there a killer tool I can use that makes selling faster and easier?” “Is there a shortcut that accelerates the selling process?” “Is there a killer presentation technique, a way of asking questions, a closing technique?” All of these are focused on, “How do I get the order faster and with less work?” When I speak or meet with groups of sales people, I can see […]
Why Do They NEED What You Are Selling?
I have to admit, part of the reason I’m writing this post is to ease my conscience (Yes, I do have one). Yesterday, I was doing a deal review. It was a very exciting opportunity and a very large deal–one of the largest this sales person would have for the year. Fortunately, he was very early in the sales cycle. He had done a pretty good job at qualifying the customer. It was a real deal for a significant amount of money. As he described it, he focused on the technology of the solution (he sold technology products/solutions). He had […]