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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
Customer Service Is Overrated!
I was reading an interesting discussion on customer loyalty at Focus.com. The responses focused on great customer service. This matches my experience when I talk to executives worldwide. It’s what most customers cite when questions about how they make buying decisions. Sometimes, I wonder if all of us, customers included are missing the point. Don’t get me wrong, customer service is critical, but I wonder if there is something that’s really more important. What if we designed products, services, buying experiences that didn’t need customer service? How could I as a customer be truly delighted? If I’m buying a new software product, I don’t […]
Performance Management Friday — % Of Opportunities Advanced
Our goal as sales people is to help our customers move through their buying process. We want to help them move as rapidly as possible to making a decision (hopefully for us). From our point of view, as sales professionals, we monitor this as progress through the funnel or pipeline. Ideally, on a monthly basis, we want to see new deals flowing into the pipeline, deals closing and moving out of the pipeline, and deals moving from stage to stage within the pipeline. A couple of months ago, I wrote about Pipeline Flow/Velocity. It’s one way of looking at whether […]
How Do You Know If The Customer “Knows?”
As sales professionals, we are supposed to be masters of effective communication, yet too many times we overlook even the simplest of issues. We’ve sent the customer some information–we assume the read it. We’ve sent the customer some information–we assume they understand it. We’ve sent the customer information and assume it addresses their needs, because we believe it addresses their needs. We think we have answered a question or responded to a concern, but really haven’t. Based on their “experience” and “background” we assume they know certain things. They’ve sent us a query, we are working on it, we assume […]
What’s Next? Do You Really Have A Deal Strategy?
I must review hundreds to thousands of deals every year. Often, sales people struggle, the deal is stalled, they are losing traction, they need to make something happen and move the deal to closure. Often in reviewing deals, I feel as though I am watching a ping pong game. The sales person does something (ping), the customer responds (pong), the sales person follows up (ping), the customer asks a question (pong), …….. This can drag on endlessly, or it can stop at any time the customer loses interest. Sales people need to be more purposeful in thinking about their sales […]
“I Made A Mistake”
I had a great conversation with a remarkable executive the other day. We were talking about the sales strategies he had established for his organization. At one point, he made the comment, “I made a mistake.” At the time, it seemed like the best decision, but things hadn’t worked as he had anticipated. In our conversation, there were no excuses, no rationalization, just the simple statement, “I made a mistake.” We discussed why things hadn’t worked out the way he had hoped, what he had learned from it, and explored options for moving forward. It was a remarkable, unfortunately rare […]
Where’s “The Decisionmaker?”
That’s the $64K question for all sales people. Who’s the decision-maker and how do we get access to her? Conventional sales wisdom tells us to focus on the top, prowling the halls of the executive suite, trying to develop relationships with the CxO. Finding that decision-maker, persuading him that we have the right solution and getting a favorable decision is the “Holy Grail” for sales people. But in complex B2B decisions, it’s seldom that simple and rarely an appropriate strategy. Too often, we forget about all the stakeholders involved in the decision. People responsible for the implementation, people who will […]