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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
Before We Challenge Our Customers, We Have To First Challenge Ourselves!
I’ve been writing a lot about the importance of sales people challenging their customers—bringing them new insight, ideas about how to improve their business, opportunities to grow the business or improve their operations. It’s important for sales to differentiate ourselves by engaging our customers in different conversations than we have in the past. However, before we challenge our customers, we have to earn the right to challenge them. We have to first challenge ourselves–to assure we are capable of engaging in a meaningful conversation. Challenging is not about the ability to deliver the latest snappy presentation, but to have real […]
Performance Management Friday — Time Management
Time Management is a top issue impacting sales productivity. It’s tough to establish measures on time management. Some people keep an inventory of what they’ve gotten done, for example to-do’s completed. One of the things I like tracking–not on an ongoing basis, but from time to time is: Time Available For Selling. There are lots of ways to look at this. It’s important to establish your own definition and maintain consistency in how you track it. Many tend to define it in the following way: Time actually spend meeting with customers and prospects (whether in person or on the phone/web […]
Are We Doing The Right Job In Training Sales?
A colleague, someone who’s been at the top of his game in sales training for years, sent me a note the other day. One sentence floored me, “I think we are teaching our people how to sell rather than to think.” He went on to say while knowing how to sell is important, it’s no substitute for thinking. I couldn’t agree more. So much of our training, so many books focus on “how to,” but don’t provide a framework about what we are doing, why we are doing it and what it means. People follow the scripts, but when things […]
Insight Based Selling — It’s Not Rocket Science
There’s a lot of talk about Insight Based Selling. It’s a great conversation, but to some degree, I’m confused. Hasn’t it always been the sales person’s job to provide customers insight? I think most sales people recognize this, but the problem is the “insight” customers value has changed profoundly. Those sales people that have not recognized and adapted to that change are not providing insight—they’re wasting the customers’ time, telling them things they already know. It used to be the insight customers’ valued was help with their problems—sales would come and educate customers on solutions to those problems, focusing on […]
Our Customers Are Missing The Opportunity To ….
I get involved in helping launch lots of products. Clients are bringing new solutions to the market, they want to maximize the impact, they want to reduce time to revenue, they want to grow as rapidly as possible. Product developers, product managers, marketing, sales–everyone is excited, “Something new to talk to our customers about! Something that can drive new revenue! Something to beat the competition!” In short the want to Sell A Lot Of New Stuff! Inevitably all these introductions look the same, everything is about THE PRODUCT! It’s always Bigger, Faster, Better, More Functions….. Marketing has all sorts of […]
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, […]