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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
No Sales Model Is Forever, What To Do When What Worked Isn’t Working
Often, I go into a sales organization that is struggling and am amazed to see they are approaching the market and customers the same way they always have. They have the same sales deployment model, their sales process hasn’t changed in years, the profile of the people they recruit and hire hasn’t changed, same metrics, same compensation system…….. Everything that has served them well in the past, is no longer serving them effectively. Some are caught in a precipitous downward spiral in terms of sales performance. Others are struggling to stay even, they are working harder, longer, faster; but it’s […]
Why Would They Ever Choose To Do Business With You?
Not many months ago, I was involved in a very complex sales situation with a client. This client sold high end capital equipment into specific manufacturing processes. They had an opportunity with to do a deal that represented a couple hundred million dollars. They had asked me for help in developing and executing their sales strategy. As I listened to the team describe the account history, goals, the sales situation, the competition, and everything else, one question kept going through my mind, “Why would the customer ever make a decision for my client?” Based on everything they told me, I […]
A Frenzy Of Initiatives Is No Way To Improve Sales Performance!
Sales people and managers tend to be action oriented people. It’s no wonder that when we start facing sales performance problems, our natural reaction is to try to do more faster. Not enough qualified opportunities, pump up the number of prospecting phone calls, the number of emails, do more. Not making the numbers, got to make more proposals, do more pitches, find more customers. Both at an individual and organizational level, it seems our natural reaction to improving performance is to add activity and initiatives. Somehow, if we are busier, we think we will produce more. In most cases, this […]
SPAM Works!
I’ve been getting some interesting responses from my post, When Will Sales People Stop This Insanely Stupid Behavior? A number of folks have correctly pointed out, if these techniques didn’t work, why do people continue to do them? They are right–unfortunately, SPAM works. Those un-researched calls, where people are basically dialing arbitrary lists, and many other approaches do produce results. The thinking is, “We got 1 response for this 1000, so why don’t we do the same thing only for a million.” The cost of a SPAM campaign is virtually nothing, so the logic is reasonable–for every million, we get […]
When Will Sales People Stop This Insanely Stupid Behavior?
Why do executives, marketers, and sales people continue this insane behavior?! Why do they invest their time and precious budgets in creating meaningless SPAM which, at best is ignored, at worst creates people who are hostile to their brands and companies? A week ago, I wrote about insane telemarketing calls, “Can I Have 15 Minutes Of Your Time?” Companies (in this case a global 50 technology company) waste millions in dollars and people hours, diminishing their brand value with mindless marketing and sales drivel. Here’s the latest piece that sneaked through my SPAM filters: TO: info@excellenc.com FROM: Sunny@some nameless recruiting […]
Being Helpful To Customers Must Be For Profit!
I write a lot about being customer focused, about helping customer identify new opportunities, look at new ways of growing, assess new ways of running their businesses. I’ve long advocated being consultative, facilitating the customer buying process, and creating value in every interchange. A lot of the discussion focuses on “being helpful to customers.” This creates confusion and lots of questions, “I’m accountable for selling my company’s products and services, how will I achieve my goals if I focus on being helpful to the customer?” “If we focus on being helpful to our customers and not pushing our products, how […]