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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
Avoiding Simple
It seems to be part of human nature to make things more complicated than they really are or than they need to be. Over the past few days I’ve been at the Forrester Sales Enablement Conference. Scott Santucci has driven a brilliant theme, calling for sales enablement professionals to become Simpletists—a combination scientist and simplifier. I’ve been surprised, there’s been some resistance to the notion. It got me to reflecting. Consciously or unconsciously, we seem to have a propensity to avoid simple and simplicity. We’re educated and trained about complexity. In sales, we refer to the complex sales process. We have endless meetings, developing complex […]
Lean Sales And Marketing–“Every Activity Has A Context”
I’m at the Forrester Sales Enablement Conference. It’s fascinating, I’ll have a lot more to write over the coming weeks. Last night, however, I was at dinner with a sales person. We had a fascinating conversation — at least I thought so. As a side note, I always start the conversation with, “How are things going;what do things look like in your accounts, territory; will you make your number?” Somehow, these conversations tend to become mini deal and account reviews. But the conversation was really fascinating. He had a number of very large accounts and we were talking about how he […]
Love The Insight, I’ll Write A RFP!
The good news, we’ve engaged our customers with stunning insights. You’ve gotten them excited, they’re motivated, they want to change! The bad news, the brilliant insight you provided didn’t cause them to immediately succumb and give you a PO. They’ve assembled a buying team, they’re going to start to shape their priorities, evaluate alternatives……. Hold on there, that’s not the way this stuff is supposed to work! How can they take your insight and put it out to bid? Well, the crass answer is, “They’re the customer, that’s what they get to do!” You’ve stimulated the customer to enter into a […]
Social Media Versus The Traditionalists
I was reading a very good post at OpenView Labs site, Can Social Prospecting Make Cold Calling Irrelevant. It’s very good and you should be sure to read it. But it got me thinking, Social Media changes so much. It provides rich new tools we can leverage, the new communities we can engage, and the new possibilities to change the way we work. Yet we apply those capabilities with the same old mindset that we have applied the traditional, old school tools. I think the discussion and the focus puts the emphasis on the wrong things. First, we are still thinking […]
Do You Have Enough Confidence To Listen To Your Customer?
I think too many sales people lack confidence! Listen to them on sales calls, they’re constantly on the defensive or on edge. They ask questions, listen selectively–usually hearing what they want to hear, often reacting defensively to something the customer might say. They always rush to respond, sometimes interrupting the customer before they’ve completed what they have to say. A customer may have an objection, a question stated poorly, a different point of view. When stated, too many sales people immediately react and respond. Some sales people make a mistake. They think they are driving the discussion, “controlling the conversation,” […]
Stop Basing Your Probability Of Winning Based On Where You Are In The Pipeline!
Yeah, yeah, we all know it’s how we’ve “always” forecasted probability and weighted our pipelines. Yes, for some reason all the CRM vendors “out of the box” implementation of the pipeline ties probability of winning to where you are in the sales process. But when are we going to stop this simplistic and flatly wrong thinking about the probability of winning a deal? You know what I’m talking about. We have a prospect who returns our call, we immediately declare a 10% probability of winning, because our systems are set up like that. We have a couple of meetings, have qualified them, determined their needs, […]