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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
Selling Math, Can We Do Better?
We focus on scaling and growth. We revel in incredible growth rates, doing better than we did last year, having aspirations to do better next year than we did this year. We are hitting the numbers, maxing our comp plans, keeping our investors happy. We engage in high fives and chest bumping all around. Of course, that it getting more and more difficult. Fewer are doing this, and it is never easy. We struggle to do more and more, leveraging technology to help get us on target. What if we hit pause and started doing some math? What if we […]
Are Methodologies Even Relevant Anymore?
I read a fascinating discussion about the relevance/utility of sales methodologies. There were people with very good arguments on both sides. I have to confess, very early in my career, I didn’t pay much attention to the methodology we were supposed to use. Part of it was my arrogance, I thought I could come up with better and more relevant approaches than any standard methodology. I had some reasonable success “doing my own thing.” But, as I ran into difficult situations, where I had no experience or idea how to move forward, I found myself falling back on the methodology. […]
Sometimes, You Don’t Know What You Are Looking For Until You Find It….
We are driven to get answers. We know what we are looking for. With our customers, it’s their needs, requirements, who’s involved, how they are going to make a decision, when, who else they’re considering, why this is important to them, and on and on…. We doggedly pursue the answers to the things we are looking for. Likewise, we expect our customers to be the same–but opposite. They know what they are looking for, they just need to get the answers. What are the capabilities of our solutions, features, functions, feeds, speeds, price? Who else uses the solutions, what’s the […]
Do You “Practice What You Preach(Sell)?”
Years ago, in CRO or CEO roles, I was involved in buying tools, training, consulting to help improve the performance of our teams. While we had people assigned to drive most of the process, inevitably, I would be involved in some of the final presentations. In each of the presentations, I would ask one thing, “Show us how you are using your tools to help you sell to us.” For example, if they were selling training, I’d ask for a call plan or a deal plan or an account plan. Of if they were selling technology, I wanted to see […]
Freeing Up Time
The hot area of focus for many of the new AI based tools is how it frees up seller time. We can get these tools to write our emails, to help write proposals, to do the research and prep for meetings, to eliminate many of the administrative tasks, CRM updating and all sorts of things that take seller time. The promise of these tools in freeing up seller time is stunning. But something is missing from the conversation. Once we free up the time, how should sellers be using it? What should they be doing? And, more importantly, Are they […]
Relationship Selling
Relationships are important in selling, in business, and life. But what does that mean, at least for selling? The old stereotypes and some that were prevalent when I started selling include that backslapping sales person, with the latest jokes, who focused on becoming a “buddy.” They were the one’s that not only sent their customers birthday cards or took them out for drinks, but they also sent their customers’ kids birthday cards. The mantra of these sellers was, “When the going gets tough, the tough take their customers to lunch!” …and there are too many sellers still using this as […]