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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
Try Selling Sand
As much as sales people try to sell solutions or sell value, too often they fall back on great products. They focus on product, features, functions, feeds and speeds. Recently, I saw a “sales playbook” from an enterprise software company. It was 121 pages, of feature by feature comparison of their product to competition, “Our date field is structured this way, which is better than the competitors………” Too often, particularly with organizations with great, hot, or complex products, our selling is really about the product and nothing else. We limit ourselves, we frustrate the customers. As great as our products […]
Questions We’re Afraid To Ask
We all have them, Questions We’re Afraid To Ask. They’re obvious, but we’re afraid to ask them. Will we offend the customer? Will they make us look stupid? Are we afraid of the answer we might get? Not asking these questions are what holds us back. Usually, they involve a root issue–not asking them holds us back. We may be chasing a bad opportunity, we may be missing something fundamental, we may be making an error, we may not be contributing in the most important way possible. Almost always, the question is obvious. It’s staring us in the face, we know it’s […]
Stumped
Today, I read probably the most impactful posts I’ve read in months. It’s entitled Stumped, by Mark McCarthy. It’s simply brilliant, you would be doing yourself a disservice by not reading it. I won’t do it justice, but I wanted to add my thoughts to Mark’s. As sales professionals, we think we have to have all the answers. The customer has a question–we leap to answer, sometimes not really answering the customer’s real question. We find customers who have problems, we have all the answers—now if only we can get them to buy. In reality, our customers have very difficult […]
On LinkedIn And Recommendations
Perhaps, some “guru” has just published something about the importance of LinkedIn Recommendations. In the past week, I’ve gotten several requests from people for recommendations. Here’s the bad part, they are people I don’t know! Yes, they are connected with me, but other than what I read in their profiles, I don’t know them. Some of you may argue, why did you connect with them if you didn’t know them–that’s fair, but I honor about 85% of the requests for connection. There are some that just don’t look right, the open networkers, there are people who want to connect but […]
Doing The Right Thing, Doing Things Right
I believe there is a basic sense of honesty and integrity to the way people behave–though everyday there are stories that test that belief. I believe that people tend to try to do the right thing. Yes, every once in a while you get burned, but you move on. But this is not a post on honesty and integrity. It’s just a simple post on doing the right thing and doing things right. When things are going right, we tend never to question this. Doing the right thing is easy, it’s natural, there’s no problem, no tugging in the back […]
Buyers Are Self Educating, So Should Sellers!
Buying has changed. The traditional role of the sales person in “teaching” the customer about solutions and products is much less important. Buyers are self educating on the web. Depending on which research you read, as much as 70% of the buying process is completed before sales people are even engaged. The web provides a vast array of sources of information to prospective customers about solutions. Companies are responding, providing rich content, helping prospects better understand solutions. Discussion groups, user groups, LinkedIn, Facebook, all provide more information than a prospect could possibly consume. Simple Google queries can provide endless sources of information to […]