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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
It’s Not About The Questions, It’s The Conversation
There’s a huge amount of discussion about questions in selling. Entire books have been written about questions and questioning, questions are the focus of all sorts of training programs and fodder for thousands of blog posts (a few of which I’ve written myself). But questions aren’t the fundamental issue–conversations are. Questions are an important part of establishing a conversation, but I think focusing on questions creates an imbalance and may, in fact, detract from our ability to have conversations. What’s critical in sales is establishing meaningful, high impact conversations with customers. Those conversations are an exchange of information, ideas, opinions, […]
Questions, Questions, What Are The Right Questions?
I’ve been involved in a number of conversations about questions recently. They’ve covered topics like, what are the best questions, what should we avoid, and other areas. These questions are always difficult to answer, because so much of the time, the best response is, “It depends.” What may be a bad or inappropriate question in one situation could be good in another (I think I’ve learned this by asking the right question in the wrong situation). I thought I’d provide some thoughts on problems I see in sales people’s questioning strategies. I won’t address questions themselves, but will focus on […]
Will That Be One Funnel Or Two?
My post yesterday, The Death Of The Funnel, Long Live The Funnel, stirred up some interesting conversation. I thought I’d continue to stir the pot by challenging the notions of marketing and sales funnels. Frankly, I’m not sure why we ever needed to have two funnels (maybe it was some marketing VP didn’t want to talk to the sales VP), but I think the time for two funnels is long gone. In theory a marketing funnel is the set of activities that attract the interest of prospects, increase awareness and understanding of the potential of our solutions, and keep their […]
The Death Of The Funnel, Long Live The Funnel
I’ve been reading a lot of articles, some from people who should know better, declaring the death of the funnel. I have to admit, I get frustrated and tired with a lot of this talk. But more importantly, I think it demonstrates a complete misunderstanding about what the funnel really is. The funnel is simply a representation of a process. People choose to label or represent the “funnel” in different ways. I interchange the words pipeline and funnel, but mean the same thing. Some times, I use the concepts of selling cycles or buying cycles. Pictorially, it sometimes looks like […]
Management Reviews: More Discussing, Less Reporting
Fred Wilson’s Bored Of Directors post struck a chord with me. It reminded me of the majority of management reviews I’ve seen. I participate in 100’s of reviews every year—pipeline, deal, call, account, territory–all of them. Somehow, they are all the same–someone’s standing up front, they have their PowerPoint’s–all in 10 point font, and they go through page after page of data, reporting on what has happened. There are a couple of questions, a few sharp criticisms, then time has run out, the next victim is on deck. These reviews to strike dread in each participant–sales people steeling themselves for […]
Competition Got You Down?
Understanding our competition is critical to our success as sales people. Too often, though, I see sales people underestimating their competitors and what their customers may think of their competitors. As a result, they fail to develop a winning strategy or are outsold by the competition. One of the primary reasons sales people underestimate the competition is they’ve “drunk the Kool Aid.” Great sales people are proud of the companies they work for, they are excited about their products and solutions. They believe in them so strongly, they think nothing can compare. This level of excitement and passion around the […]