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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
Being Wrong — It Can Be A Great Starting Point
A number of years ago, I was prospecting. It was a mid-sized company. I had a very good referral to the CEO. In researching the company, I discovered some fairly big risks to their growth. I also discovered some opportunities they were missing in addressing certain part of their market. I prepared for the meeting with the CEO. My goal was to discuss their priorities and strategies, to use these risks and opportunities as potential discussion points to stimulate the discussion and to explore things that our firm could do to help them grow. I met with the CEO, we […]
Let’s Put An End To Product Training!
I can already hear the distress from product managers and product marketing people. How could we possibly imagine putting an end to product training? How would sales people understand and be able to pitch our products? Well, my response is pretty simple and crass, it doesn’t work! Billions of dollars (euro, yuan, yen, pounds) are spent every year in training sales people about products. More is spent in collateral, samples, materials. All it does is makes our sales people knowledgeable about our products. Very little helps the sales person solve the customers problems. Perhaps if we turned things upside down […]
Buyer’s Remorse
Lauren Harper posed an interesting question at Focus.com: “As a sales rep, how do you ensure your clients don’t get buyer’s remorse?” It struck me as a key issue sales professionals overlook. Think about it, during the sales process, we put on our best face, focusing on the customer, their needs, trying to create value, aligning with their buying process, helping them solve their problem. Success, we get the order, we thank the customer, then we’re off to the next thing, another deal, another order. After all, we achieved our goal, an order! That’s where we go wrong, that’s where […]
Before We Challenge Our Customers, We Have To First Challenge Ourselves!
I’ve been writing a lot about the importance of sales people challenging their customers—bringing them new insight, ideas about how to improve their business, opportunities to grow the business or improve their operations. It’s important for sales to differentiate ourselves by engaging our customers in different conversations than we have in the past. However, before we challenge our customers, we have to earn the right to challenge them. We have to first challenge ourselves–to assure we are capable of engaging in a meaningful conversation. Challenging is not about the ability to deliver the latest snappy presentation, but to have real […]
Performance Management Friday — Time Management
Time Management is a top issue impacting sales productivity. It’s tough to establish measures on time management. Some people keep an inventory of what they’ve gotten done, for example to-do’s completed. One of the things I like tracking–not on an ongoing basis, but from time to time is: Time Available For Selling. There are lots of ways to look at this. It’s important to establish your own definition and maintain consistency in how you track it. Many tend to define it in the following way: Time actually spend meeting with customers and prospects (whether in person or on the phone/web […]
Are We Doing The Right Job In Training Sales?
A colleague, someone who’s been at the top of his game in sales training for years, sent me a note the other day. One sentence floored me, “I think we are teaching our people how to sell rather than to think.” He went on to say while knowing how to sell is important, it’s no substitute for thinking. I couldn’t agree more. So much of our training, so many books focus on “how to,” but don’t provide a framework about what we are doing, why we are doing it and what it means. People follow the scripts, but when things […]