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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
Losing The Negotiation Before It Starts!
Sales people seem to be obsessed with negotiation. They read books, they take all sorts of classes, they strategize “negotiation” sessions. Oddly, when I push on the negotiation issue, most negotiations that sales people focus on is about price. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been involved in a lot of very complex negotiations for very complex deals and projects. Price is always an element, but there are a whole number of other elements–actually usually focused on ensuring each party has thought through things and is committed to shared success. There are lots of scenarios that require very complex negotiations, but for most […]
Inside Sales Is Only Great For Transactional Commoditized Products!
Not long ago, I was meeting with the top management team of large organization. They had traditionally, had a large field sales organization. The performance of the organization was OK, they were making the numbers, but increasingly challenged. Sales people were just overworked, stretched very thin. Volumes and expectations were increasing. The needs for recruiting and bringing more sales people on board were skyrocketing. And the costs of selling were starting to spiral out of control. The top management team was asking me what to do. I know they were thinking, how can we make our field sales people sell […]
Scroll Factor And Problem Solving
Email is such a powerful tool for communicating. Properly used, it can really facilitate our communication, but like any tool, it’s a double edged sword, it can cause us to screw up at the speed of light (or at least at the speed of our web connections.) I’m starting to become more aware of a problem that I’m sure has existed for a long time. I call it the “scroll factor.” You know what I mean, it’s one of those endlessly long message streams, with everyone piling on. It starts out simply with someone, let’s call him John, sending an email: […]
The Customer Is A Real Person, Not An Abstraction!
Recently, I wrote, “Solve The Damn Problem!” It’s generated a lot of interesting comments and discussion, but as he usually does, Mike Webster, challenged me with an intriguing question. He asked why companies get so easily distracted from solving the customer problem? I responded with some ideas, but I start thinking about it more–and not just in the context of solving customer problems. Too often, I think organizational inability to be customer centric or customer focused is because for too many in our organizations, the customer is an abstraction. When we talk about customers, we tend to talk about markets, market data. […]
Why Are They Buying?
I’ve completed a few days of doing deal reviews with some really terrific sales teams. The teams had done outstanding jobs. They had great deals, they’d done pretty well in positioning themselves with the customers and were looking to win. They are much like the 1000’s of reviews I’ve been a part of. We’re talking about the situation, what’s going on with the customer, the competition, what we need to do next. Time after time, we’re talking about what the customer is buying, what we’re selling, and what we need to do to win. Inevitably, we get to talking about […]
What Are You Helping Your Customers Discover?
As he consistently does, Seth Godin has captured the crux of Insight based selling in a very simple post. It’s really the issue of Search Versus Discovery. This post is mandatory for any sales or marketing professional. So much of what we have done in the past has been to support and simplify our customers’ abilities to Search–or Research. That is to find the answers to questions they have. The questions may be very complex, finding the answers may not be simple, understanding the answers may not be easy, applying them in a manner that produces the desired result may, also, be difficult. […]