Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
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 […]
Sitting On The Customer’s Side Of The Desk
Not long ago a sales person called be with an idea that I thought was interesting. He was “pitching” a concept, it was a little intriguing but I had to interrupt him, saying, “What you are saying is very interesting to me, however this is the issue we face with our customers, here’s how we see things, this is what we’d like to achieve.” The sales person responded, “We really see the issues as this, and this is how we approach it.” I responded, “I understand, but we may be a little different, I’m interested in what you are saying, […]
Customers Don’t Know How To Buy!
One of the biggest mistakes sales people make is overestimating their customers’ knowledge of how to buy. As a result, sales people miss the opportunity to support the customer in their buying process. I believe this is one of the most overlooked areas in which sales people can create distinctive value, enhance their relationship, and start moving into the “trusted advisor role.” Think about it, for many complex B2B solutions, how many times in their careers does a customer make a purchasing decision? If you look at major software solutions like ERP, Financial, CRM/Sales 2.0, Manufacturing, and other solutions—a customer […]