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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
An Output Of The Sales Process Should Be Profitable Customers
Most of the time we look at our sales process and think of it as producing deals, orders, or revenue. Don’t get me wrong, those are still critical outputs of the sales process. However, too often we fail to think about the quality of the deals we close. In our competitiveness or hunger to close business, we sometimes win the wrong deals. A key goal of the sales process needs to be producing profitable customers. This sounds obvious, but too often, we don’t know a customer has the potential of being unprofitable until after we get the order, or until […]
How Do You Use Your Downtime?
Sales people always seem to be busy and on the “go.” We’re running from meeting to meeting, we have phone calls to make, and then there’s always email. We seem to always be in motion, always doing something. But then there is the “downtime.” Those few minutes waiting to see the customer. All that time traveling to and from the customer, all the spaces between those activities we have on our agendas. Upon reflection, it piles up. There are huge chunks of our day that are downtime, opportunities to do something. How do you use your downtime? Let me get […]
What Are Your Intentions?
We are all busy. We start our days already with too much on our plates. Turn on the computer, hundreds on emails come in. Tweets, texts, phone calls all compete for our attention. We look at our schedules, meeting after mindless meeting, phone calls, web conferences. We struggle with organizing our time, dealing with interruptions, juggling schedules and priorities. At the end of the day, week, month, we wonder where the time has gone. We’ve made some progress, but often we seem further behind. Too often, it seems like habit or momentum guides our behavior. “This is the way we’ve […]
“I Don’t Know What You Do, But I Know What You Need To Do!”
We know we have to challenge our customers to think differently, that we have to bring ideas and insight. We try to be provocative to catch our customers’ attentions. But absent an understanding of the customer, being challenging or provocative is just another pitch! My good friend, Tamara Schenk, shared a story with me. A vendor approached her, stating, “You need to make some changes in the sales enablement strategies you are driving in your organization! You need to do this………” You guessed it, it was a pitch for his solution. I laughed when she told me her response, “Thank […]
What Did You Sell That For?
As a preface, I have to confess to a little frustration and some venting. Too often, when I speak to sales people and ask them about what they sell and their customers, I pose the question, “What did you sell that for?” The responses, while logical, are frustrating. Often, the sales person responds with “That was a $ 1 million deal,” or something indicating the order size or revenue. Alternatively, they respond with the product they sold, “The customer was looking to buy some new software and chose our solution,” or “They wanted to buy this piece of equipment, and I […]
Stop Letting Your Competitor Define Your Sales Strategy!
Recently, I was doing some reviews with a sales team. We were talking about some of their deals and they were consumed with a specific competitor. They complained, “How do we deal with this competitor? How do we respond to the things they are doing?” With those questions, I could see they were in deep trouble. But they were in a position that too many other sales people fall victim to. The sales people were letting the competitor drive and set the sales strategy instead of having it driven by the customer. There’s no mincing words, this is a losing strategy […]