Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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.
“Well duuuuuh Dave, what a stupid question, isn’t easy to tell? After all, isn’t easy to tell, we’re either hitting our numbers or not?” Hitting the number is how we tend to measure sales performance, but it’s really a terrible indicator of whether the organization is performing to the highest level possible. Hitting the number only tells you that you’ve hit the number–but it tells you little about performance. Let’s look at some real examples I’ve encountered in the past few years: Perhaps arrogantly, I called a sales executive of a large company and suggested his sales team had a […]
Read MoreRecently, I’ve been reviewing a lot of closing presentations. It’s been for a variety of companies, in different industries, giant and small, around the world. They are all resoundingly the same—and deficient. They’re also a reflection of our sales strategies, so they are, to a degree a reflection of how we have positioned ourselves with the customer. Here are some things I’ve observed: They’re all about us: First, there are always 3-4 “corporate glamor” pages. These are the pages that brag about our companies. They’re filled with how big we are, how many employees. There is always at least one […]
Read MoreThe only thing worse than losing is losing after a loooonnnnnnng sales cycle. I’m constantly amazed at sales people investing time and resource chasing bad deals, but too many fall into the trap and stay there. It’s tough finding opportunities these days. Many sales people are desperate to find something, anything, get a prospect to find a deal. We struggle to find someone that’s willing to meet us. We get that meeting, the customer expresses some interest—or at least that’s what we think we hear. Immediately, we latch on, we put it in our pipeline, we assign a 25% probability […]
Read MoreDifferentiation is critical to sales. It sets us apart, enabling our customers to distinguish between alternatives. In the absence of differentiation, it becomes difficult to win—often the differentiator is the price. Differentiation is increasingly difficult. Products increasingly look the same. Any alternative the customer is considering will probably do the job. There may be small differences in features, functions, capabilities–but these are wiped out with the next new release of a product from our competition. Company reputation—it’s size, strength, position in the market, and other things may be differentiators. But in today’s world of buying, it may not be. When […]
Read MoreA couple of days ago, I ranted, in part, about my experience with my past computer supplier. We had depended on their computers for many years. Over the past several weeks, I have had power supply, battery problems and related issues. I’ve spent hours on the phone with customer service representatives. Each one of them has been very polite and reassuring, “We will get your problem solved!.” As we’ve been “solving” my problem, I get passed to different departments. Each department is apparently responsible for a particular aspect of the problem. One is software and overall system, one is hardware, […]
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