Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Finding The Decisionmaker
We want to focus our sales strategies on the Decision-maker. Some have referred to that person as “VITO,” the Very Important Top Officer. Sales trainers tell us to call high, in the quest for finding the decision-maker. We talk about gate keepers, influencers, recommenders, technical buyers, financial buyers, and any other label we can find. Finding the decision-maker is tough! Part of the problem, in complex B2B sales, there is seldom a decision-maker. According to CEB, there are 5.4 decision-makers involved in today’s consensus sale. Even then, they have a very difficult time coming to agreement. CSO Insights reports only 45.9% […]
“I Have To Speak To You In Bullet Points…….”
Understanding our customers’ behavioral styles is critical to our effectiveness in connecting with and communicating to them. There are a number of tools that help us understand the behavioral style of our customers (and colleagues). They go by the names of DISC, Meyers Briggs, and others. Each of us has a behavioral style—our styles are neither good nor bad, they just tell us how we tend to hear and engage, how we process information, what influences our abilities to make decisions. If we want to connect effectively and impactfully , it’s critical for us to understand the behavioral styles of […]
Why, How, Who, When, And What
There’s a huge difference between what our customers go through to buy and what most sales people do in trying to sell those customers. It’s this difference that causes much of the disconnect between customers and sales people. It’s recognizing this difference and engaging customers in their entire buying process that separates great sales people from everyone else. Loosely, I characterize the buying process as Why, How, Who, When, and What. I’ll pause for a moment, you’ll have to give me a little literary license as I describe this. I know I’ll get comments saying is should be another variant […]
Dreamforce By The Numbers
Dreamforce is an incredible event. In addition to being probably the largest conference focused on sales and marketing, it has a tremendous impact on San Francisco and on SalesForce.com Charities! Take a look at Dreamforce 2014 by the numbers. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)
The Complete Sales Professional
Dreamforce is coming up next week. As a result, I’ve been inundated with emails from people and companies inviting me to one of their presentations or to their display or for any other type of meeting. They leverage data to help entice me. For example, I see LinkedIn data that says, “Sales professionals who use social selling are 51% more likely to exceed their quotas.” Or CEB data saying “Sales reps who challenge customers’ assumptions make up 54% of high performers in a complex sales environment.” The data point are all interesting, absolutely valid, and compelling. They usually have a format like, […]
The Manager’s Real Job Isn’t Making The Number
I wrote “Sales Managers Only Have One Real Goal.” It stimulated a lot of thoughtful conversation. Christian Maurer shared a particularly astute, and troubling observation: “I am afraid though that many high level executives might not share this view. In the name of shareholder value they are still chasing after the number and forcing first level sales managers to do the same.” Sadly, I think Christian’s right. Too often, we’re focused on chasing the number. We define everything we do as managers around the number. But this focus shows a real misunderstanding. Our attainment–making our numbers, achieving goals are outcomes […]