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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
Teaching Our Customers To Sell
I recently wrote about Teaching Our Customers To Buy. In the article I mentioned the importance of customers selling within their own organizations. To many, that’s an unnatural, detestable act. After all, if they wanted to sell, they’d be sales people, wouldn’t they? “Selling,” internally, is critical to people getting things done and moving their initiatives, strategies, programs forward. Within organizations, there’s always selling going between people and groups, but people don’t tend to think of it that way. Too often, also, people are relatively naïve about how to get what they want within their organizations. They think, “I put […]
Prognostications And Wild Ass Guesses For 2015
We’re officially into the fourth calendar quarter of the year. It’s the time where you start seeing various pundits dusting off their crystal balls guessing what the big issues facing sales and marketing professionals in 2015. It’s also the time, various publications ask my views–even though at times I think my crystal ball is a little murky, I’ll contribute to those. I worry that I start showing my age, that I start looking old/crotchety, or that I appear slightly cynical. But every time I read these articles and start discussing the big issues for the coming year, I get this […]
Teaching Our Customers To Buy
By now, at least if you’ve been reading the literature on selling, we know the importance of Insight, Commercial Teaching/Learning, or whatever you call it. The focus of these are to help the customer realize there are opportunities they may be missing. There are opportunities to grow, to improve their businesses, to reduce costs, to improve their customer experience, to respond more quickly to competition —- to recognize the need to change. If we’re successful at this, we get the customer all hot and lathered to change. To do something different, to take action. Now the hard work begins. With […]
“Dear Occupant Or Current Resident….” More Horrible Prospecting
I’ve decided to write a periodic series about bad prospecting letters. Every week, I receive dozens of just horrible letters. Fortunately, Outlook does a pretty good job a sending them to SPAM, so I don’t have to deal with the “I’m following up with the terrible prospecting letter I sent last week with another terrible letter.” They are from sales people who are just executing poorly. Maybe they haven’t been trained, they are getting bad templates or materials. Even though they are bad letters, there are too many to single out. An in some sense, it may not be fair. […]
Finding Time For The Decisionmakers
I wrote, Finding The Decisionmaker, discussing the consensus buying process and the increasing number of decisionmakers involved in complex B2B sales ( Average of 5.4 according to CEB.) My good friend, Martin Schmalenbach, always calls BS on me in such interesting ways. Martin posed the issue, “Think of the poor sales person reading this. They are already overwhelmed with deals/opportunities and managing what they have going on. Now you are asking them to call on 2-3 times more people. How are they going to do it? How are they going to research, prepare and manage their time with the increase […]
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% […]