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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
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 […]
Questions We Are Afraid To Ask
Often, in talking about deals with sales people, there are things that just don’t make sense. The customer is doing things that don’t make sense–they are very far off our normal experience in similar sales situations. They may be responding in a very unusual manner. They may be asking things that are really wrong–perhaps missing critical issues they should be looking at, demonstrating real misunderstanding of the issues they should be considering for a solution, or focusing on the wrong issues. Sometimes, perhaps in the very worst cases, if we were in their shoes, we would not be considering some […]
Sales People Are Not Automatons!
Recently, I was doing pipeline, deal, and territory reviews with several sales teams. In the reviews, they were clearly struggling–they had new sales processes, new tools to help them in executing their deal strategies, developing their accounts, and managing their pipelines. All had been put in place to help improve their effectiveness and performance. But they were struggling, performance wasn’t improving, they were spending a lot more time on the tools/processes than they were in actually engaging and executing with customers. As we progressed in the reviews, it became clear they were getting caught up in the “form” of the […]