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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
What Do We Do Next?
Every year, I sit through hundreds of deal reviews. They all seem to go the same way. The sales person talks about the deal, the competition, what the sales person or team has done. Too often, too much time is spent reviewing and discussing past history. However, at some point in the review, the discussion shifts to, “What do we do next?” Often, there’s a bit of an uncomfortable silence. Then a lot of random ideas start surfacing, “We should probably meet with…..,” “Maybe we should do this……, ” “Let’s do a demo…..,” “Let’s have one of our executives call […]
Are We Allowing Ourselves To Be Commoditized?
My colleague Anthony Iannarino wrote an outstanding post: “Mismatched Skills And Value Creation.” Usually, Anthony and I are so aligned in our thinking that we tend to complete each other’s sentences. But I had to disagree with part of his post, it was the perspective he presented on Commodity Buyers. Virtually every product and service, at some time in it’s life cycle moves to commoditization. As differences between offerings become smaller; as buyer familiarity with the products, solutions becomes greater; as perceived risks to the purchase decision become much smaller; then there is the potential that our offerings become commoditized. Given […]
Customers Are Self Educating/Informing, But What Are They Learning?
We all know the shifts in buying. The web offers a tremendous resource to all of us. There is an overhwelming amount of information available on virtually every topic. There’s a lot of data that says customers don’t want to see sales people until later in their buying cycle–presumably the final phases, as they have developed a short list of alternatives. Many think this is wonderful–certainly on the customer side they get to avoid all those terrible sales people. From the sales side, we now get involved with really serious customers and our sales cycles can be much shorter. So […]
Prospecting–Exhausting All The Alternatives
Truth be told, most sales people would prefer to have a root canal than prospect. Sales people do deals—we love the engagement with a customer that wants to buy and is willing to give us an audience. We love the adrenaline rush of competing in the final stages of the customer buying process, convincing the customer that we have the superior solution and can create the greatest value for the customer. Then, it’s capped off by the customer calling us to let us know we got the deal! In an ideal world, we would be blessed with never-ending qualified opportunities […]
Sales Process, A Special Version Of Project Management
Recently, I met with the executive team of a large consulting/systems integration company to discuss Sales Processes and why was critical for their organizations to have a sales process. Before we started to discuss the sales process, we talked for some time about their business. I asked, “What’s most critical to your success in delivering these complex IT projects to your customers?” They all quickly responded, “It’s really two things, it’s the quality and experience of our people and it’s our project management approach.” I asked them to talk about their project management approach. They started to describe it with […]
Are We Speaking The Customer’s Language?
Recently I was in China in a series of meetings with CEO’s of Chinese companies. The meetings were great, but we each struggled to maximize their impact. My Mandarin is very limited–basically to “Hello,” “Thank you,” and a couple of other words. Many of the executives spoke some English and were very polite in trying to communicate in a way that I could understand. Mostly we relied on an interpreter. The problem was, the interpreter interpreted the discussion–that is he describe things based on how he heard them, not necessarily what was intended. So we had to be very careful […]