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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
Performance Management Friday — Compliance Is Not The Point Of CRM Systems!
There’s always a lot of discussion in the Sales 2.0, CRM worlds about compliance. Millions are invested in new systems–supposedly. There’s a great urge to make sure people are using them, so compliance has become a key topic of discussion in lots of places. Basically compliance is measuring, “are people using the system?” Compliance — at least the way it’s commonly used is absolutely worthless! Reporting on who has signed into the system, how many times they’ve logged in and all the related measures are meaningless. While some of the vendors would claim it’s important, the goal of CRM is […]
Wanting To Buy Is Insufficient, Does Your Customer NEED To Buy?
Some of you reading the title will say, “Dave’s really gone off the deep end this time, if the customer wants to buy, isn’t that enough?” Maybe in B2C that may be sufficient, but in today’s B2B world, it’s not enough. I’m seeing too many sales people with too many stalled deals. Too many deals clogging up the bottoms of funnels, too many deals that are “almost there,” perpetually. Sales people claim, they’ve done everything possible, but they just can’t get the order. We drill into those deals, “What’s keeping the customer from moving forward?” I may be playing some […]
Selling Process Or Buying Process?
My post yesterday, The Secret To Sales Success, stirred up a twitter discussion about whether there is a Selling Process or if everything is about the Buying Process. Since I have a hard time saying my name in 140 characters, I thought I’d move the discussion to the blog, and hope the folks tweeting could follow the discussion here with comments. Let me step back a little. Years ago, we sales professionals had the arrogance to focus only on the Sales Process. Everything was about the steps and activities we went through to move the customer through our pipelines and […]
The Secret To Sales Success
It seems to be human nature to look for the secrets to success—the formula, if followed, will lead every sales person to the pot of gold at the end of every deal or opportunity. I know what that secret is, I’ve resisted revealing it, but have decided it’s time. What would you do if you knew that in every opportunity you did certain things, and that if you did those things the probability of winning the deal is very high? You’d probably do those things. What would you do if you saw data that showed, if you do these things, […]
A LinkedIn Rant
It’s been a while since I’ve ranted, but I’ve hit a tipping point. It’s about LinkedIn–actually, about how people use LinkedIn. I can’t imagine any business professional not leveraging LinkedIn as much as possible. It’s powerful in building your own brand and people’s awareness of you. It’s a powerful research tool, enabling us to get a little deeper insight into the people we are talking to, helping identify potential prospects. It’s a powerful tool to exchange ideas and learn new things in many of the group discussion boards. I tend to do all of it. I actively start and participate […]
You Have To Care To Differentiate Your Value
The rise of “Big Data,” rich analytics and other capabilities enables sales and marketing professionals to engage the customer in very different ways. They also provide tools to provide more data driven insight in our deals and proposals to customers. Having business justified solutions is important to creating value to customers. But I worry the pendulum is swinging too far to the analytics and data side. Sales is not “just about the facts.” Our customers have fears, uncertainties, concerns. Our customers are people and history tells us too many decisions are made for emotional reasons, later supported by the data. […]