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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
Lean Sales And Marketing — Time Available For Selling
A sales person’s job is to sell–nothing surprising. More and more, however, it seems that things conspire against us, diverting us from engaging our customers. There’s some market research that puts the time available for selling at around 42%, but more and more, that figure seems optimistic. Several years ago, we did a study of a one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. With their B2B sales people, we found time available for selling had slipped just below 20%. More recently, with several large clients, we found time available for selling in the range of 22-34%. Regardless, which […]
Things Are Getting Confusing?!?
We have a rich array of products and solutions to offer our customers. There are multiple channels for our customers to buy our products. We can’t become expert in everything. Everyday I work with organizations and sales people facing very tough issues in working with their customers. Trying to understand the breadth of their products and how they go to market is confusing to them. Organizations are having an increasingly complex array of solutions presented to their customers through a complex array of channels. It’s difficult to keep up with them within our own organizations–but think about it from the […]
Building Your Sweet Spot
In my post, Focus On Your Sweet Spot, I spoke of the importance of developing a rich profile of your ideal customer and focusing viciously on qualifying opportunities within the sweet spot. It’s a fundamental to sales success. Too often, we have a poorly defined sweet spot or none at all. This adversely impacts everything we do as sales people–our win rates our lower, our sales cycles are longer, our competitiveness is lower, our ability to defend our margins is lower, and our ability to create and leverage value for our customers is lower. And then, for those we win, […]
Focus On Your Sweet Spot!
I talk about the importance of “focusing on your sweet spot,” a lot, often taking for granted people understand what I mean. My post, An Output Of Your Sales Process Should Be Profitable Customers, generated a number of phone calls and email discussions about the sweet spot. So I thought I’d add some thoughts to clarify and better define it. When I speak with sales professionals, I often ask them< “What’s your sweet spot?” The responses are all over the place, but include: “We focus on small businesses,’ or “We focus on enterprise selling,” or “We provide solutions for (insert the […]
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 […]