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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
Buying Has Nothing To Do With The Product We Sell!
We constantly get it wrong, as sales people we focus on our products and what we are selling. As “sophisticated” sales people, we wrap some nice language around it and focus on the solution we sell, hiding the fact that we are focused on selling a product. The real problem is we are focused on selling. Our customers should be focused on buying, but they really aren’t, they’re focused on solving problems or addressing opportunities. Most of our customers’ difficulty in solving problems or addressing opportunities has nothing to do with the solution. But, again, that’s what we focus on. […]
Losing
I’m writing this with some trepidation, I worry that my message will be misunderstood or used by poor sales people as an excuse. With that as a disclaimer, there’s real value in losing—but we have to take the time and extract the value that losing provides us. We never want to enter any sales situation to lose it. We have to compete vigorously, doing everything we possibly can to win! It’s our job, it’s what makes us successful, and it’s what professional sales people live for. However, recently, I was engaged in a conversation with someone claiming his organization’s win […]
What Do We Talk To Them About?
What do we talk to our customers and prospects about? To me, the answer is obvious–yet based on the calls and emails I get from sales people, somehow it must not be that obvious. Everyday, I must get at least a dozen emails or calls from sales people wanting to talk to me—typically the subject they want to talk about is there products. Most of the attempts to start a conversation are just clumsy, “I’d like to talk to you about what we sell.” Some are more artfully worded–“I’d like to discuss how leveraging [Insert some capability] can help your […]
Performance Metric Friday — Personal Development
As we finish the year and get ready for next year, it’s time to look at our personal performance metrics a little differently. Each of us has to take responsibility for our own personal development. Sure managers should be helping us improve our performance through coaching and providing the right training, but fundamentally, we are responsible for making sure we develop and improve as sales professionals. Personal development comes through all sorts of formal and informal experiences. We learn through training programs, through books, articles, blogs we may read (hopefully you’re learning some from this one). We learn at conferences, […]
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 […]