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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
One Size Does Not Fit All
I wrote about “The End Of Solution Selling” the other day. There’s a rich conversation, about this at the HBR site of the original article, kicked off by my friend, Charlie Green. My friend Jack Malcolm expanded on the discussion in his post today. Wherever you land in the discussion, I think it’s important to recognize that “One Size Doesn’t Fit All.” That is, each customer buying situation is different. Sales people need a rich array of approaches and tools to intercept the customer in their buying process, align with them and to sell. Helping the customer identify new opportunities to […]
“The End Of Solutions Sales”
In the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, the folks at the Conference Board have declared “The End Of Solutions Sales.” Upon reading this, I immediately thought of Mark Twain’s quote, “Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated.” While, I suppose, it stirs up the pot to declare the end of Solutions Selling and may sell more workshops or consulting services, in the end I think it is wordsmithing and positioning. Instead of this, we should be driving greater clarity in how sales people can create great value for their customers. That’s by helping them identify and solve problems. […]
Lean Sales And Marketing — Making Workflow Visible
First, I have to credit my friend Jack Malcolm as the inspiration for this week’s article. He’s writing a parallel series of articles. Recently, he wrote Applying Lean Methods To Personal Work. Make sure you read it. Most of us tend to be very visual. Afterall, for centuries people have referred to the Chinese proverb, A Picture Is Worth 10,000 Words. Likewise, we seem to have a greater ability to capture insight from highly visible forms of data presentation. Infographics are exploding as a means of visualizing complex concepts, data and other ideas. Every CRM system supplier touts their dashboards as […]
Adding Value–Selling To The Professional Buyer
Somehow, we think selling to Buying (Procurement and Sourcing) professionals than selling to “end users” or functional departments. Most of the time we look upon the experience with dread. We do everything we can to avoid or go around them. We try to get the end users to override them. We believe their function is solely to hammer us for price. We’ve been taught to sell solutions, to be consultative, to focus on value creation–but all that goes out the window in dealing with Procurement Professionals. Talk to Procurement Professionals and they say the same thing. They say, “Sellers don’t […]
Managing Complexity
It should come as no surprise to anyone that has been semi-conscious over the past decade, that our worlds are becoming increasingly complex. Our jobs, and those of our customers are more complex and difficult. Fewer people doing more. The rate of change is accelerating. We have too little time to accomplish even our “A” priorities. In a recent IBM CMO Study, 79% of the respondents expect high/very high level of complexity over the next 5 years, yet only 48% felt prepared to deal with it. There are lots of technologies, some of which many of the readers may sell, that […]
The Almost Perfect Sales Management Article
The other day, I read, The Science Of Building A Scalable Sales Team, by Mark Roberge of Hubspot. It was almost brilliant! What resonated with me is the radical simplicity with which Mark approached (and described) building a sales team. In a world where too many try to overcomplicate things, Mark’s article cut to the essence of building high performance sales teams. Summarizing: Hire the same successful sales person every time. (P) Train new hires in a consistent measurable way. (S/T) Provide our sales people with the same quality and quantity of leads each month. (S/T) Work those leads with the same […]