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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
Sending Your Sales People Out Naked, The Problem With “Challenger Selling”
Over the past month or so, there’s been a huge amount of conversation about Matthew Dixon’s and Brent Anderson’s “The Challenger Sale.” It’s one of the best books on selling over the past few years, and should be mandatory for every sales professional. More importantly, it should be mandatory for every CEO, marketing professional, customer service professional, product management professional. My problem isn’t the book, the authors have articulated the necessity and a great methodology for establishing new conversations with customers. They’ve done a great job with it. My problem is on the implementation side. I’ve spoken to many folks, […]
Getting From Here …. To There
Imagine a contest. You’ve landed in a city you’ve never been to before. You’re goal is to get to a certain location. Others are trying to reach that location, you don’t know who they are. The person that gets there first gets $10 Million. Motivated? You’ve been given a high powered car to get to your destination. You’ve been to “driving school,” and have learned the best techniques in driving the car. You jump into the car–no GPS. You look around some more, no maps of the area. No problem, you start driving. You’re on the freeway, suddenly you discover […]
Performance Management Friday — Sales/Management Alignment
In this week’s post on performance metrics, I’ll take a step back. Rather than looking at a specific metric, I’ll spend a little time talking about the differing points of view on metrics—the sales person/individual contributor’s view and sales management’s view. Too often, these are viewed as being conflicting. Sales people resist metrics because management uses them as a club on performance. This happens more than we’d like to think, it’s really terrible management practice. Rather than discussing this, let me focus on how sales people and managers should really be on the same page. As individual contributors, or managers, […]
“I Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Sales Process!”
That’s what I hear from lot’s of sales people—not in the meetings, but when we’re having a cup of coffee or a quiet one on one. To a large degree, I agree with them–but for completely different reasons. Too often, sales processes are designed, implemented, and mandated from the top down. The sales process is put in place to respond to management’s (legitimate) need to understand the state of the business—whether it’s a deal or an opportunity. Or it’s not a process, but a methodology that’s been taken from a sales training vendor and is being twisted and tweaked to […]
Selling—Doing What You Have To Do
Selling has always been a tough job. Everyday, it becomes tougher as customers leverage other resources to help make buying decisions (why they actively seek to avoid sales people is the topic of dozens of other posts). In spite of the challenges to success in selling, I see too many sales people making bad choices—they focus on doing what they want to do rather than what they have to do. It would be great if we could be successful focusing on what we want to do, personally, my favorite part of the sales process is thanking customers for their order. […]
Buying Isn’t Important, It’s The Results Of Buying That Are Important!
We’ve spent a lot of time nurturing the customer. We’ve discussed their business strategies, problems, opportunities. We’ve presented case studies to show the results they might expect from our solutions. We’ve gotten them to think differently about their business, we’ve done our best in consultative selling. The customer is excited about the potential, they assemble their buying team, they start defining what they want to achieve, they start discussing what they want to do, evaluating options and alternatives. We continue to work along side them, drilling into their business, refining our solutions, presenting a business justified solution. But things start […]