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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
On Being Present And Engaged
We struggle to catch our customers’, our managers’, our colleagues’ attentions. We want to engage them, in the case of a customer, we want to get them interested in doing something with us. But so many times, when we actually capture someone’s attention, we rescue defeat from the jaws of victory by not being present and engaged ourselves. It happens in so many, often unconscious, ways. We may be driving our cars, seeking to be productive by making phone calls on the way. We may be sitting in our offices, doing emails or something else while we are making prospecting or other […]
How Can We Deliver Insights Without Critical Thinking Skills?
Both marketing and sales realize we need to change the conversation with customers–if we’re going to be relevant and invited to help solve their problems. The past few years, the literature has been filled with lots of approaches: Provocative Sales, Challenger Sales, Insight Based Selling–and I’m sure there are a few more. Each offers us ways to change the conversation with the customer. Likewise, there’s been a lot of good work on how top performers differ from everyone else. The one thing that seems to be missing from the conversation is the importance of “critical thinking/problem solving skills.” Instead, we seem […]
Principles Of Sales, Part 2 — Value Is Exchanged
I wrote the Not So New Principles of Sales, where I identified the second not so new principle as: “Selling is about exchanges in value between people. Each must have something the other wants, otherwise there’s no need for an exchange. The exchange can be about a variety of things: ideas, problems, dreams, information, data, opinions, and, sometimes, money.” This post dives deeper into this principle. The concept of value is tossed around a lot in any conversation about selling, but everyone has a different context or meaning for value. Also, the over-use, or misuse of the term diminishes it’s […]
A Plan Based On “Bluebirds” Is Not A Plan
Every sales person loves a “bluebird.” Those are those orders that suddenly appear, we didn’t know about them, they weren’t in our pipeline, but every once in a while the Earth, Moon, Sun and Stars align and a customer wants to buy, without our ever being involved. Bluebirds happen, we gladly accept the order and proclaim victory when they happen. Bluebirds are parts of what happens with every sales person and in every territory. However, we can’t build a plan based on bluebirds. If we did, our plan is pure wishful thinking. As sales professionals it is our responsibility to maximize […]
Sales Management Review Cadence
I’m not sure anyone looks forward to the Sales Management Review (sometimes these are called QBR’s, but there are other reviews). It’s unfortunate, because there’s a huge amount of value in the review process–both for sales people and managers. There are lots of problems with the way we conduct these, which create the anxiety, and the often valid assessment they are a waste of time. They include: Poorly defined objectives/outcomes. Mixed confusing objectives. Absence of preparation on everyone’s parts. No agenda, wandering aimlessness. Mixing meetings—the objectives of pipeline reviews, deal reviews, sales call reviews, account territory reviews are different, but we mix […]
Buying Happens In The Absence Of Selling
In my post, Principles Of Sales, Part 1, Interactions Between People, Brian MacIver (@Palayo) made a brilliant observation–frankly something that I hadn’t paid much attention to. We tend to think Buying and Selling go hand in hand. But as Brian points out, there’s a huge amount of buying that happens without selling! It’s easy to understand–think of all the ecommerce sites (both B2C and B2B), think of rich electronic trading networks, or even the simple “re-order/re-stock” transactions that happen every day. It’s easy to think this is limited to “transactional or commoditized items,” but increasingly we see it in more complex buying. […]