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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
Insight And Co-Creation
Yesterday, I was talking to one of the smartest sales executives I’ve ever met. We were talking about, what else, selling with Insight. His team had quietly been doing this for years–a very long time. When you look at the track record of success and growth, clearly both the overall organization is doing great things and his sales people are executing differently than their competitors. We were talking about how his team engaged customers, what they did differently, and why it was so effective. After a few minutes of talking, it both struck us the power of Insight really comes […]
What Do The Numbers Mean?
Sales professionals are very “numbers” focused. Where are we on quota attainment? What revenue is produced today, this week, this month, this quarter? How many calls do we make today? How many meetings did we have this week? How many proposals did we complete? There seems to be no end to the metrics we can establish for sales. But the metrics or number have little value by themselves. However, to often, it seems too many sales people and managers focus on the numbers as the goal. We know outbound prospecting calls are important. Establishing an arbitrary goal, say 100 per […]
Sales Person As Orchestrator Or Resource Manager
The role of the sales person is changing–we all know that. The way customers buy is changing, the complexities of our own products and solutions, the broad range of people involved in the customer buying process mandates a different approach to selling and careful reconsideration of how we define the role of account and territory managers. My posts, Sales Role Agility and Separating The Challenger Sales Person From Insight Delivery, stimulated many comments and conversations. Increasingly, for complex B2B solutions, no single person can master everything needed to drive customer success. In mid sized to larger companies, the sheer breadth of solutions […]
Separating The Challenger Sales Person From Insight Delivery
Are “Challenging” and “Insight” synonymous? I had been mixing them together, but more recently have been thinking they may be but don’t have to be. Or actually, I’ve been thinking, “Does the Challenger sales person have to be the provider/teacher of the insights, or is she the orchestrator and manager of the process?” So much of the discussion around Challenger has been on providing Insight and the Teaching Pitch. Sales organizations have been investing a lot in preparing sales people to go out and challenge, providing pitches and decks the sales person uses to “teach the customer.” But now we […]
The “Street Price” Is All That Counts
Go to any bazaar or souk in the Middle East or Africa, go to a marketplace in Latin or South America, go to the famed “Silk Alley” in Beijing and you quickly learn the difference between the marked price and the “street” price. No one pays attention to the marked price. The starting point for discussion is the street price and the perception of value is based on the presumed street price. So when I go to Silk Alley (which I try to avoid, but am sometimes dragged to) and see something “priced” at 1000 Yuan, my assessment of value is never based […]
If The Customer Doesn’t Want To Buy, Discounts Won’t Help
We’ve been working with a customer, diligently talking about their problems and concerns. Educating them about our solution. Trying to move them through our sales process. They’ve been interested, somewhat. They’ve met with us, asked us the right questions, perhaps given some buying signals, but things drag, the deal becomes stuck. The customer isn’t saying no, but they aren’t moving forward. It’s just hanging there, we want to get them to buy! So we play the discount card. Too many sales people think resistance is about money, so unilaterally, they offer the discount to break the deal free. “Buy now […]