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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
“Turtles Only Make Progress When They Stick Their Necks Out*”
We often wonder why we aren’t making progress. Our results aren’t improving, we don’t seem to be growing. We may be doing OK, but we aren’t doing great, we just get by. If we really want to excel, if we want to outperform others, we have to take risks, we have to do things we’ve not done before, we have to make mistakes. So much of our business and sales culture goes against this. We don’t try new things because we don’t want to make mistakes. We want to control everything that we do–organizationally or individually, so we script things out–requiring […]
Financial Literacy—Critical For Sales
Financial literacy is critical for sales success. We have to be able to understand the numbers. We have to be able to understand the impact of our solutions on the customer–presenting the impact in financial terms. Yet I’m constantly amazed by the lack of basic financial literacy among sales professionals. There are little hints in all sorts of conversations: “The ROI on this deal is 7 months.” ROI is always expressed as a percent, Payback is expressed in months/years. Or sales people are troubled by the lack of CAPEX budget, yet they never look at financing alternatives to take advantage of OPEX spending. (If […]
Coaching The Sales Process — Deal Reviews
By now, you know my obsession with strong Selling Processes. It’s important, but misunderstood aspect of sales effectiveness. One of the things I’ve discovered as a result of my diatribes, is many sales managers really don’t know how to reinforce the sales process in their coaching and development of their sales teams. I’ve gotten a lot of questions on this topic from sales managers, and I suspect there are a lot more that are embarrassed to ask about this. Often, I when I get involved in review meetings, I find myself in a role of coaching both the sales person and in […]
SBWA — Selling By Walking Around
Tom Peters and Robert Waterman introduced the world to the acronym, MBWA–management by walking around, in their 1982 book, In Search Of Excellence. Apparently, term can be traced back to practices in HP in the 70’s. The concept is that executives get a much better understanding of what’s happening in their organization through informal visits–random tours of factories, facilities, meetings with groups or people/customers. Rather than structured visits, heavily scripted and prepared, the ability to observe and assess what’s really happening is critical to making progress. Today, as we struggle to find Insights and create value for our customers, I think […]
Principles Of Sales Part 3-Selling Is About Change
I’ll continue to expand my discussion of The Not So New Principles Of Sales, addressing the third principle, Selling Is About Change. “Selling is about change. Both parties must want something different than what they now have or do. If either party sees no need for change, then nothing happens.” In a way, it seems like this is one of those “Duhhhhh” type statements, it should be obvious. As sales professionals, we are trying to get our customers to change—change vendors, change the way they do things, change their businesses. The odd thing, is that most sales people don’t tend to […]
Sales Training And Human Interaction
Annually, billions are invested in sales skills training. On top of that, millions are spent on books on sales techniques, thousands of articles are written. People are constantly looking for an edge, “What are the ways I can get by the gatekeepers?” “How do I craft an opening sentence that captures the prospect’s attention and gets me a meeting?” “What’s the best way to handle the objection?” “How do I close the customers?” In too much of the training on sales techniques, the customer is an abstraction, the object upon which we execute our techniques, bending to our will — at least if […]