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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
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. […]
Doing What It Takes, Figuring It Out
I had a conversation with an interesting individual today. It was a fascinating conversation–different from so many that I have with sales people. I was interviewing a candidate for a client. On paper, the person didn’t seem to be a natural fit, but I was taken by this individual—at least his mentality and attitude. Too many people I speak with have a sense of entitlement-that they are owed something. Whether deserved or not, there is an arrogance about their jobs and (always) compensation. They often refuse to recognize the need to change–even if they see things aren’t working they continue […]
Coaching Is Tough Enough, Why Do We Make It More Complicated That It Need Be?
I’ve been reading a lot of different stuff about coaching recently. It’s good to see the different points of view, I learn something from each of them. But in the end, sometimes I wonder if we are taking something that is already very tough and making it more complicated than it need be. I read endless debates about who we should spend our time with, A’s, B’s, or C’s. Everyone has a different view. Some people even try to measure the optimal time spent coaching each person each week—it’s 15.23675899 minutes per person per week–OK I made that up, but […]
Maximizing Sales Management Impact
Sales management is one of the toughest jobs around—particularly that of the first line sales manager. Fundamentally, our job is to maximize the performance of our sales teams–both tactically and strategically. I read a post, How the VP of Sales can Inspire their Sales Team with 4 Simple Habits. It got me reflecting on how managers maximize their impact, and where managers should spend their time, not just the Vice President of Sales, but all levels of sales management. The post offers some interesting suggestions, frankly a number of them I disagree with very strongly. Let’s start with the areas […]
Are Your Customers Doing The Right Job Of Qualification?
“What are you talking about Dave? Qualifying is the job of sales, why are you talking about customers qualifying opportunities?” It’s absolutely correct, one of the most critical success factors in sales is qualification. Sales people need to viciously disqualify opportunities that aren’t in their sweet spot. It may be a real deal, but it’s not your deal–so don’t waste time on it. But I think sales people need to go further–I think sales people need to hold the customer accountable for qualifying the opportunity—is it real for them? If we’re doing our jobs as sales people, we’re identifying lots […]
What About Challenger Buying!
I’ve written quite a bit about Challenger Selling and it’s many related concepts–it is after all a different articulation of the solution, customer focused, consultative, value based, provocative selling approaches we all know. Every once in a while, I think–wouldn’t it be novel to look at things from the customer’s perspective? What might Challenger Buying look like? There are a couple of perspectives we might think about. One is Challenger Buying has existed for a very long time–we, as sales professionals are waking up to the fact and addressing it. The other is how difficult it is to do Challenger Buying–from […]