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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 Are We Going To Understand, It Really Isn’t About The Product!
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been on the road constantly, I think I’ve logged over 50K miles, sat in dozens of meetings, account/deal/call/pipeline reviews. I’ve spent a lot of time in airplanes and hotels, so I read lots of stuff–books, magazines, blogs. I keep hearing common themes (and I’m guilty about contributing to many of these themes.) Selling has changed…….buying has changed…..our products, services, solutions are commoditized…..our value as sales people is being marginalized….selling is becoming about transactions…..the needs for sales people is shifting…… and some articles imply the “death of the sales person,” with appropriate cheering from many […]
Fifty Shades Of Forecasting
It’s the end of a frighteningly busy week. So my mind’s fried, and I start considering silly things. A few weeks ago, I wrote “Reality (Sometimes) Sucks!” Don Lafferty provided a great comment in a LinkedIn group. He said, “Funny, my regional sales managers never want reality to get in the way of their forecasts.” Don’s comment got me thinking. I could really write a New York Times Best Seller–in the Fiction category. I’m thinking of calling it “Fifty Shades Of Forecasting.” I am imagining that it will have all the elements of important to a Fictional Best Seller: Lies, Deceit, […]
RFP’s Suck!
My friend Jim Keenan is stirring up the pot with his latest blog post, Finally The Truth About RFP’s. Be sure to read it and the comments. I’ve really mixed feelings about the post, I both agree, and I disagree. Don’t get me wrong, I still think RFP’s Suck, we never respond to an RFP that we haven’t written. And I think that may be the point Jim’s struggling with in his post. By the time the RFP is written and issued, the selling is done. The purpose of the RFP is vendor selection. So if we wait to start our […]
Rethinking Qualification, Has The Customer Qualified Themself?
The other day, I wrote an article about, “How Much Do You Want To Spend?” The subsequent discussion has been causing me to rethink many of my ideas about qualifying opportunities and customers. It suddenly struck me that for most of my sales career, I’ve approached qualification as being about “my company,” or “me.” I ask the customer about how serious they are about the project, how serious they are about considering my solutions, whether they are willing to pay for my solutions, and so forth. Every sales person does that. We’ve even coined acronyms that test this—BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, purchase Timeframe). […]
“How Much Do You Want To Spend?”
“How much do you want to spend?” “What’s your budget?” These and other questions are classic qualifying questions sales people ask. To tell the truth, these questions have always bothered me. The only logical answer a customer can give to these questions is, “As little as possible.” The other problem with this approach, is in qualifying, we are setting up the discussion through the sales process to focus on price. Early in the discussion, we focus on price, it can only continue focusing on price. Additionally, paying what we are selling is just a portion of the overall funding they will be […]
Don’t Answer That Objection!
A few days ago, I was tagging along with a sales person on a call. It started well, then the customer expressed an objection. That’s when things started to go wrong. The problem was, like too many other sales people, the sales person had an immediate response to the objection. Watching the situation, when the customer expressed the objection, I could see the hair going up on the back of the neck of the sales person. He felt defensive about what the customer was saying. He thought the customer was wrong and wanted felt obligated to respond. Well, it wasn’t […]