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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
Constructing Insight
Thanks to my friend Brian MacIver for his brilliant phrasing on this critical concept on Insight. There’s a terrible misunderstanding on the concept of Insight. Too often, I see organizations caught up in the Insight movement, but focusing only on the front end of the process. Marketing people are busy building messaging programs around our Insights. Sales is impatient for marketing to deliver their polished presentations, then they rehearse diligently to create commercial teaching. Armed with compelling presentations, having rehearsed their spontaneous Whiteboard pitch, they go to customers declaring, “We have some Insights……,” dreaming of the ideal outcome. We know what that […]
“No Decision Made” Is Still A Competitive Loss
Depending on the research you look at, “No Decision Made” has a huge impact on results we produce. The lowest levels I’ve seen with leading market research firms is a little more than 20% of forecast deals end in no decision made. Other reports have it going up from there, some as high as 50% of forecast deals. Recently, I’ve noticed a weird kind of psychology around these types of deals. Yes, we don’t like them, but somehow it isn’t as bad as losing to our competitors. We don’t treat these deals as a loss, we typically don’t go through […]
Sales Operations–Connecting Everything To Produce Results!
I spend a lot of time talking about sales managers, executives, and sales people. Often it’s on how we maximize our impact in connecting with customers, or maximizing performance –organizationally or individually. But the Sales Operations and Enablement functions are critical in providing the ability for managers, executives, and leaders to do this. It’s sales operations that provides the systems, tools, processes, training, and programs that sales people execute. It’s sales operations that tracks the results, helping sales executives determine whether we are on track or take corrective actions in getting back on track. Good sales operations executives focus on […]
Insight Without Action Is Just Idle Chatter!
Today, we are all trying to engage our customers with Insight. But so much of what people think of as Insight ends up prompting no reaction from the customer. Perhaps, they might say, “Thanks for sharing.” Maybe you’ve gotten them more interested and they respond, “That’s interesting stuff.” Or you’ve gotten them hot and lathered and they say, “Wow, I’ve never heard that before!” But if we don’t produce a compelling response, “We’ve got to do something about this situation–now,” the insight is just a nice discussion. The purpose of our Insight is not to just to share interesting data […]
Maybe It’s Us That Keep Our Customers From Moving Forward
Surely I must be a heretic suggesting it’s sales people that keep our customers from moving forward. After all, don’t we give them new ideas about their businesses? Don’t we talk about the new things our products and services enable them to do? Don’t we demonstrate how wonderful things could be with our shiny new solutions? Customers look at those, some get all hot and lathered. “Wow, that’s brilliant stuff!” “You’ve got a great solution!” “Wow, I can really see the value of that!” Yet they don’t move forward. They don’t buy. They remain rooted to what they currently do, […]
“Let’s See How Much We Can Confuse Our Customers!”
I actually wanted to title this, “Let’s See How Much We Can Screw With Our Customer’ Minds,” but decided against it. I know no company would purposefully try to confuse it’s customers, making it very difficult for them to understand their offerings and buy. Unfortunately, that’s an unintended consequence of a lot of what I see happening in too many Go To Customer Strategies. Recently, I was reviewing the Go To Market Strategy of a software company. Actually, I was doing some competitive analysis for a client and struck gold. My client’s competitor had done what too many others do. […]