Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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.
Yesterday, I wrote about Value Creation. One individual raised an interesting point in a discussion on LinkedIn. He said his customers really value his approach in value creation. They saw it as a differentiator and is was important in differentiating himself from others. But he went on to say that he didn’t get the same positive response from new prospects. This is a great issue, it’s one that impacts anyone who is “Challenging” their prospects. I think the problem is that we have to “earn the right to Challenge or create Value.” Challenging must have a foundation built on trust. […]
Read MoreWe 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 […]
Read More“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 […]
Read MoreRecently, 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 […]
Read MoreThe 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 […]
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