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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
Time Available For Selling, Again……
There was an interesting post, Why Your Reps Are Spending Less Time in Front of Customers, be sure to read it. They cite an alarming fact: “the amount of time reps spend in non-sales or administrative activities increased by 33% between 2004-2006 and 2010-2012.” Customer facing time is decreasing, with more activities being focused on pre and post sales activities. They go on to say, “high-performing reps spend about 10% less time in front of their customers than core reps,” suggesting the decrease in time spent in front of customers is not as big a problem as one might think. […]
“I’m Not Paid To Have Conversations, I’m Paid To Get Orders!”
I write and speak frequently about customer focus, engaging customers in conversations about their business, and understanding customers. I’ve also taken pretty strong positions against the “show up and throw up” style of selling. The other day, was speaking to someone about these topics and the importance of engaging customers in talking about their business rather than pitching. The individual I was talking to asked an interesting question, “Don’t you waste a lot of time in conversations with people that won’t buy?” I asked him what he meant, he responded that if the customer isn’t interested in our solutions or […]
Leading By Example
Every manager knows this, it’s Leadership 101, we must Lead By Example. What much of the literature misses, is that we are always Leading By Example, whether we do so consciously or unconsciously. What we, as leaders do every day, how we behave, the things we get involved in, how we set priorities — our people watch, observe, and emulate. What we do, always trumps what we say. So the issue isn’t about Leading By Example, but Are We Setting The Right Example? The other day, I was meeting with a group of sales executives. As often happens, the issue […]
“This Conversation Is Really About Me”
The other day, I was speaking to a sales executive. We were talking about improving the impact of sales people in engaging customers, finding and pursuing more opportunities. Before I go further, this was a very sharp executive. The sales organization was very focused and appeared to be a high performance organization. They had a fantastic solution that solved important customer problems. The sales people were sharp, articulate, appropriately aggressive. The executive described the things they had in place, the things they were doing, their tools, systems, processes. They were doing “Vito” letters, developing, and presenting cost justified solutions. Both […]
Hearing What We Want To Hear
One of the biggest errors any of us can make is Hearing What We Want To Hear. Most of the time it’s totally unconscious, we don’t realize what we are doing. As sales people, we want to engage the customer, we want to qualify the opportunity, we want to win the deal. We’re taught to probe and question. However, too often, those questions elicit only the thing we want to hear but not the real view, attitudes, or even needs of the customer. So we engage them in discussions about their business. We uncover dreams and opportunities. We discover challenges. […]
Why We Do What We Do
It’s so easy to lose sight of our goals and what we are trying to achieve. We start with great intentions, then we lose our direction. We start to focus on the wrong things: What’s our sales process? Our sales process is important, but why do we have a sales process in the first place? What’s our call plan? What’s our pipeline, what’s the forecast? What’s our deal strategy or our account plan? What are our marketing programs? And we can go on. The “What” questions also generate the “How” questions—How do we execute our sales process? How do we […]