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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
Maximizing Sales Management Impact
Sales management is one of the toughest jobs around—particularly that of the first line sales manager. Fundamentally, our job is to maximize the performance of our sales teams–both tactically and strategically. I read a post, How the VP of Sales can Inspire their Sales Team with 4 Simple Habits. It got me reflecting on how managers maximize their impact, and where managers should spend their time, not just the Vice President of Sales, but all levels of sales management. The post offers some interesting suggestions, frankly a number of them I disagree with very strongly. Let’s start with the areas […]
Are Your Customers Doing The Right Job Of Qualification?
“What are you talking about Dave? Qualifying is the job of sales, why are you talking about customers qualifying opportunities?” It’s absolutely correct, one of the most critical success factors in sales is qualification. Sales people need to viciously disqualify opportunities that aren’t in their sweet spot. It may be a real deal, but it’s not your deal–so don’t waste time on it. But I think sales people need to go further–I think sales people need to hold the customer accountable for qualifying the opportunity—is it real for them? If we’re doing our jobs as sales people, we’re identifying lots […]
What About Challenger Buying!
I’ve written quite a bit about Challenger Selling and it’s many related concepts–it is after all a different articulation of the solution, customer focused, consultative, value based, provocative selling approaches we all know. Every once in a while, I think–wouldn’t it be novel to look at things from the customer’s perspective? What might Challenger Buying look like? There are a couple of perspectives we might think about. One is Challenger Buying has existed for a very long time–we, as sales professionals are waking up to the fact and addressing it. The other is how difficult it is to do Challenger Buying–from […]
Facing Reality
One of the things I love the most about sales people is the eternal optimism. It really takes a tremendously positive outlook to be a great sales person. After all, we face rejection every day. We face challenges and obstacles in every situation. Some are challenges come from changing customer expectations. We always face market and competitive challenges. Sometimes we face challenges from within our own companies. It requires tremendous resilience and optimism to succeed in selling. But sometimes that optimism hurts us. Sometimes it prevents us from looking at reality, from seeing things the way they really are, not […]
What If…..
I started my career selling mainframe computers for IBM. When I joined IBM, they were just coming off several years of an advertising campaign that presented a rather stark proposition, “What If…” That was it, nothing else. For some reason that campaign had fallen out of favor with all the marketing and advertising types and was displaced by something that was frankly not memorable. But from a sales point of view, the campaign was inspirational–it still is. Today, so many of the great customer conversations begin with “What if….” or “Have you ever thought of…” or “Have you considered…..” Engaging […]
Stacking The Deck!
I’ve got a terrible confession to make. I cheat. I don’t want to play fair and square. I don’t like to play on a level playing field. I do everything I can to tilt deals to my favor. I do everything I can to stack the deck. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Our inclination as sales people is to do this. We want our customers to prioritize the things that we do well and that our competitors do poorly. Likewise, we want our customer to de-prioritize the things our competitors do well and we do poorly. We do everything we […]