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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
Does Your Customer Have A Plan?
I recently wrote a post suggesting we “Stop Giving Customers Choices!” It’s stirred up some really great discussions. I thought I’d add another post to extend the discussion. Giving our customers alternatives and choices early in the buying process is critical. It helps them assess alternatives, develop their own thinking about what they are trying to do and lock in on a plan. It helps us understand what they are trying to achieve and what solutions we might present that are best suited to helping them achieve their goals. But if we reach the “decision-making point,” where the customer is […]
Setting Expectations
I’m encamped in our local Starbucks, busy with my morning series of conference calls. Power is out at the office–the whole area is without power. It’s been out since about 10 pm last night. The power company was great in notifying us about the outage and setting our expectations about when power would be restored. They said it would be restored at 5:45 am. It’s 7:00 am, I’m at Starbucks. I did something sneaky. There are about 4 guys working at a big piece of electrical gear. They are switching out parts. I bought them some coffee. They were appreciative, […]
Stop Giving Customers Choices!
Henry Ford was rumored to have said, “The customer is welcome to buy a car in any color they want, as long as it’s black.” I think there’s something to that concept. Now before you jump all over me, let me explain myself. The other day, I was meeting with a great sales team. We were discussing some tough deals. One person asked, “How do you handle a customer that asks you for 3 alternative solutions, for example, ‘good, better, best?’” I really try to avoid in my final proposals giving customers alternatives, I believe it’s our responsibility to provide the single […]
Reality (Sometimes) Sucks!
Try as we might, sometimes we just can’t make our goals or commitments. Managers push us for forecasts. They pressure us to hit a certain number. There are mandates about what we have to do. We succumb to the pressure. We tell our managers what they want to hear, not reality. We may talk ourselves into believing what we’ve said. We certainly will try very hard to meet our commitments. But in our hearts we know there’s no way. Looking at the situation pragmatically, even optimistically, we know we can’t possibly make the commitments being requested. But we make them […]
Times Are Changing
Every day I speak with sales leaders and sales professionals who are struggling. They are astute professionals, they are working very hard, but struggling. They may be making their numbers, but just barely. They may be just shy of their numbers. CSO Insight’s 2014 Performance Optimization Survey shows continued performance declines with 58.2% of sales people making quota (down from the previous year at 63%), and 83.9% of organizations making their revenue plan (down from 89.2%). People are working harder. They are leveraging tools to help them. There is no end to new programs and initiatives. But they continue to struggle. […]
We’re All Going To Mess Up
Try as we might to do things right, we’re all going to mess up every once in a while. We may say something that upsets a customer. We’ll miss opportunities with customers. We may miss a commitment. We will lose a deal we shouldn’t have lost. We will miss our numbers. There are any number of things that we will mess up. No one is perfect, we make mistakes. Situations and circumstances change, making what we’ve done wrong. However well we may have planned, prepared, anticipated, something happens and we fail. Sometimes we fear failing so much, that we do […]