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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
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 […]
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 […]