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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
Sales Forecast Accuracy, Demand Planning And Other Ramblings
I’ve been involved in a number of conversations about my positions on Sales Forecast Accuracy recently. I wanted to share some thoughts provoked by those very good conversations. The Sales Forecast Is Not The Demand Plan! The demand plan is the basis for scheduling manufacturing (or service delivery). It ripples through the manufacturing schedule, inventory planning, shipping, procurement, supply chain management. Ultimately it impacts cash flow and revenue/expense forecasting. The demand plan is critical, but it’s not Sales responsibility. The Sales Forecast is an important component of the demand plan, so forecast accuracy is important. But it is only a component. Many […]
Going Beyond Cost – Benefit Analysis
A critical element of any high impact sales process is “creating business justified solutions.” I’d venture a guess that fewer than 20% of the deals I review have even the most rudimentary business and financial justification. For too many, sales people provide a price, and maybe a list of features and benefits that might be translated to business value–but we encumber the customer with the job of justifying the solution themselves. Everyday, I read blog post after blog post about dealing with “discounting and price shoppers.” Questions about pricing and discounting dominated discussion groups (probably second to finding qualified prospects). […]
Don’t Cheat Your Customer By Not Closing
My post, “But Will I Sound Too Salesy?” generated some interesting comments and discussions. A sentence from Dominic’s comment struck me. He shared an experience in a sales training class: “They thought the actual close suddenly transported them into the realms of a door-to-door encyclopedia salesperson, which they felt was suddenly grubby.” If we are doing the right job engaging customers in discussions about improving their business and achieving their goals. If we are focused on showing them how to achieve results they couldn’t do otherwise, we are cheating them by not closing, by not gaining their agreement to go […]
“But Will I Sound Too Salesy?”
I just got off the phone with a business owner. We were having a great conversation about how he and his team were growing the business. We were talking about some of the conversation he was starting to have in selling to larger enterprises and struggles they were having in their conversations with these customers. We went through the conversations, discussed how he might shift the direction, focusing more on their needs and the business value his company would create. At one point, he said, “But doesn’t that sound too sales?” It’s something I hear all the time. I expect […]
Let Me Get Back To You…..
You’ve finally gotten a meeting with that key executive. It’s taken weeks to arrange calendars, the meeting has been rescheduled once or twice, but the time has come. You’re face to face with her–the key decision-maker. The meeting’s going well, but there it is, the question the customer asks–and you don’t have the answer. In the good old days, it used to be perfectly acceptable to respond, “That’s a great question, I’ll have to go back to the office and research it. Let me get back to you tomorrow (or whatever time period is acceptable)” As I said, in the […]
The Customer Designs Their Own Customer Experience
We spend a lot of time talking about customer experience design. There is some value to it, but there is also great danger (and arrogance) in it. We cannot possibly design the customer’s experience, we can only design how we engage the customer for those parts of their experience that involve us. The customer experience is theirs, and it’s different for each customer (individual). The customer experience is not isolated to “this buying decision” or to their experience with us. The customer’s experience started years ago, perhaps even before they even became aware of us or our company’s existed. The […]