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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
Performance Management Friday — Sales/Management Alignment
In this week’s post on performance metrics, I’ll take a step back. Rather than looking at a specific metric, I’ll spend a little time talking about the differing points of view on metrics—the sales person/individual contributor’s view and sales management’s view. Too often, these are viewed as being conflicting. Sales people resist metrics because management uses them as a club on performance. This happens more than we’d like to think, it’s really terrible management practice. Rather than discussing this, let me focus on how sales people and managers should really be on the same page. As individual contributors, or managers, […]
“I Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Sales Process!”
That’s what I hear from lot’s of sales people—not in the meetings, but when we’re having a cup of coffee or a quiet one on one. To a large degree, I agree with them–but for completely different reasons. Too often, sales processes are designed, implemented, and mandated from the top down. The sales process is put in place to respond to management’s (legitimate) need to understand the state of the business—whether it’s a deal or an opportunity. Or it’s not a process, but a methodology that’s been taken from a sales training vendor and is being twisted and tweaked to […]
Selling—Doing What You Have To Do
Selling has always been a tough job. Everyday, it becomes tougher as customers leverage other resources to help make buying decisions (why they actively seek to avoid sales people is the topic of dozens of other posts). In spite of the challenges to success in selling, I see too many sales people making bad choices—they focus on doing what they want to do rather than what they have to do. It would be great if we could be successful focusing on what we want to do, personally, my favorite part of the sales process is thanking customers for their order. […]
Buying Isn’t Important, It’s The Results Of Buying That Are Important!
We’ve spent a lot of time nurturing the customer. We’ve discussed their business strategies, problems, opportunities. We’ve presented case studies to show the results they might expect from our solutions. We’ve gotten them to think differently about their business, we’ve done our best in consultative selling. The customer is excited about the potential, they assemble their buying team, they start defining what they want to achieve, they start discussing what they want to do, evaluating options and alternatives. We continue to work along side them, drilling into their business, refining our solutions, presenting a business justified solution. But things start […]
Top Sales And Marketing Awards
Jonathan Farrington is once again hosting the Top Sales Awards. It’s an opportunity for you to vote on your favorite blogs, books, sales Gurus’, sales tools, articles and other areas. It’s a fun contest, there are many people I really respect nominated in a variety of categories. You can vote as many times as you like, you can also register for the Awards Ceremony on December 15, hosted by Jonathan Farrington and Gerhard Gschwandtner. Have fun looking at sources for great tools, opinions, and content!
Before You Can Create Value For Your Customer, You Have To Know What Value You Create
Having a differentiated value proposition, creating value for your customers is critical for sales success. But when I speak with sales executives and professionals, it’s often not clear what really sets them apart. Everyone believes in their company, products, and services. People have to be enthusiastic about what they sell. But customers need a reason to buy–to select one alternative over another. Too often, sales people don’t know how to articulate this difference. Sure there are differences in products–but in reality, these differences are minor. If you’ve made the customer’s short list, they’ve already determined your product meets their requirements–as […]