Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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.
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 […]
Read MoreI’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, […]
Read MoreHenry 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 […]
Read MoreTry as we might, sometimes we just can’t make our goals or commitments. Managers push us for forecasts. They pressure us to hit a certain number. There are mandates about what we have to do. We succumb to the pressure. We tell our managers what they want to hear, not reality. We may talk ourselves into believing what we’ve said. We certainly will try very hard to meet our commitments. But in our hearts we know there’s no way. Looking at the situation pragmatically, even optimistically, we know we can’t possibly make the commitments being requested. But we make them […]
Read More