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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
Do Your Customers See You As An Interruption Or Value Creator?
We struggle to get customers to see us. There are hundreds of blog post, articles, training programs, and other sources that offer ideas in getting customers to respond to our emails or calls. Hundreds on getting meetings with customers. They range from sound advice, to various “time tested techniques,” to trickery and manipulation, to “miracle cures.” It seems customers have an equal number of techniques to avoid meeting with us. They just don’t respond, they put up barriers, they create gate keepers, they make it difficult to identify who in the organization we should be talking to. We wonder, “Why […]
If Your Sales Organization Is Underperforming, Would You Know?
“Well duuuuuh Dave, what a stupid question, isn’t easy to tell? After all, isn’t easy to tell, we’re either hitting our numbers or not?” Hitting the number is how we tend to measure sales performance, but it’s really a terrible indicator of whether the organization is performing to the highest level possible. Hitting the number only tells you that you’ve hit the number–but it tells you little about performance. Let’s look at some real examples I’ve encountered in the past few years: Perhaps arrogantly, I called a sales executive of a large company and suggested his sales team had a […]
Who Are The “Sales Influencers” In Your Company?
Lori Richardson posed a very challenging question at Focus.com: “What is your definition of a “sales influencer” in a B2B organization?” I struggled with this for a while, all the natural answers came to me–it has to be the sales force, but we can’t forget marketing…… The more I thought of this, the more I became convinced that while that may be the current answer, it really shouldn’t be “the answer.” The answer really needs to be everyone in the company. Sales and marketing are really the last mile, or perhaps the most visible people within the organization, but we […]
Is Your Closing Presentation Meaningful To Your Customer?
Recently, I’ve been reviewing a lot of closing presentations. It’s been for a variety of companies, in different industries, giant and small, around the world. They are all resoundingly the same—and deficient. They’re also a reflection of our sales strategies, so they are, to a degree a reflection of how we have positioned ourselves with the customer. Here are some things I’ve observed: They’re all about us: First, there are always 3-4 “corporate glamor” pages. These are the pages that brag about our companies. They’re filled with how big we are, how many employees. There is always at least one […]
Win Or Lose, Do It Fast!
The only thing worse than losing is losing after a loooonnnnnnng sales cycle. I’m constantly amazed at sales people investing time and resource chasing bad deals, but too many fall into the trap and stay there. It’s tough finding opportunities these days. Many sales people are desperate to find something, anything, get a prospect to find a deal. We struggle to find someone that’s willing to meet us. We get that meeting, the customer expresses some interest—or at least that’s what we think we hear. Immediately, we latch on, we put it in our pipeline, we assign a 25% probability […]
The Key To Differentiation
Differentiation is critical to sales. It sets us apart, enabling our customers to distinguish between alternatives. In the absence of differentiation, it becomes difficult to win—often the differentiator is the price. Differentiation is increasingly difficult. Products increasingly look the same. Any alternative the customer is considering will probably do the job. There may be small differences in features, functions, capabilities–but these are wiped out with the next new release of a product from our competition. Company reputation—it’s size, strength, position in the market, and other things may be differentiators. But in today’s world of buying, it may not be. When […]