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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
Succeeding, Winning, Exceeding Expectations—And Accomplishing Remarkable Things!
50% of sales people failed to achieve their quotas last year. We all faced tough markets, radically changing customer expectations, and new global competitors. But that’s no excuse to accept missing goal. In contrast to those 50% of sales people that failed to achieve quotas, in high performing sales organizations, over 80% of their sales people met or exceeded their goals — a remarkable difference. On May 9-13, there will be a remarkable event–remarkable in several senses. It is the 2011 Sales and Marketing Success Conference. A 5 day series of presentations and discussions by 36 of the top thought […]
“Can I Have 15 Minutes Of Your Time?”
The phone rings, I answer, the voice on the other end asks, “Can I speak to the person in your company who is responsible for _______________ decisions?” You can fill in the blank with about anything, today it was printers, a few days ago IT Networking, another time recruiting, then telecommunications, banking, health insurance, then………. Hesitantly, I respond, “I guess that’s me.” The voice at the other end, “I’m from ______________, next week I am meeting with companies in your area to present our technologies (solutions) on ____________. I’d like to spend 15 minutes with you to tell you about […]
Are You Playing For Table Stakes, Or Are You Differentiated?
It used to be great products that set us apart—more features, functions, bells and whistles. Products are no longer the differentiators—at least on an ongoing basis. Global competition keeps raising the bar almost on a daily basis. Products are important, we have to keep investing in them, but product leadership is not likely to be a sustainable differentiator. It used to be quality—our quality set us apart and caused us to win. Quality is no longer a differentiator—for the most part, it’s pretty much a level playing field—at least the customers throw out the bad quality vendors, so only vendors […]
You Need To Know What’s Keeping Them Up At Night!
“What’s keeping you up at night?” It’s a classic question many sales people use to start identifying their customers’ needs and priorities. In reality, however, it’s a terrible starting point. It may mean, you haven’t done your homwork in preparing for the call, particularly with senior executives. Great sales professionals study their customers and prospects deeply. They understand the industry, they understand their customer’s customers, they understand the key strategies and goals of each of their customers. As much as possible, they study and learn what’s happening within their organizations. Great sales people are able to put themselves in their […]
It Doesn’t Matter What We Know, It’s What The Buyer Needs
Companies spend $100’s of millions every year in training sales people about their products and solutions. As sales people, we are proud of our knowledge–naturally eager to demonstrate it to customers. Likewise, people in our company who may support us–developing sales and marketing materials, resources we may leverage to make calls an support our sales efforts—everyone is excited and passionate about the solutions we have and the great value we can bring to our customers. All of this is meaningless to the customer. The customer doesn’t care about our products and solutions. The customer doesn’t care about our enthusiasm about […]
Purposefulness–Getting What We Want versus Getting What We Get
As sales professionals, we all know what we want—-We want to win the deal, We want to beat the competitor, We want to make our quotas. We want the commission checks, We want the bonus. Ask any sales person, they’ll be very clear about what they want. Often what we want is merely wishful thinking, instead of getting what we want, we get what we get. We try hard to win the deal, we can’t quite beat the competitor, we missed our quota this year, but we’ll do better next year, the excuses can go on. Great sales professionals get […]