Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
“Me Too,” Is Not A Value Proposition!
A client called me up a couple of days ago with an interesting problem. They were in the closing stage of a very large deal. They had done a thoughtful job of understanding the customer business, their goals, the problems they were trying to address, and so forth. They had made a final presentation, it had included a good business analysis about the benefits the customer would get, and the value they should expect. They provided a good analysis including both hard and soft justification for their solution. After a few days, the customer cam back to my client saying, […]
Losing A Mentor
I just this moment learned of the passing of Mack Hanan. Mack passed away on November 25, in New York City. I first “got to know” Mack through his book, Consultative Selling. It was one of the first books I read on selling that really made sense to me. I read it in the mid 70″s when I was a young and eager IBM sales person. It’s a book I have always kept within arms reach and have referred to constantly through my career. As many of you who have followed me, I’ve always wondered why the principles Mack, Neil […]
Great Product, Lousy Service, No Sale!
Usually, I try to minimize my whining about poor sales and customer service experiences, however, every once in a while, I can’t help a short rant. Imagine this, a company has spent money trying to attract my interest in their online backup/synchronization service, they’ve sent appropriate emails, provided good marketing information. I spent some time on the phone with a sales person, making sure I understood what I was buying. She handled all my questions and concerns skillfully and politely. In the end, she asked if she had addressed all my concerns. I responded that I had, and agreed to subscribe to this servic and […]
Who’s Got Sales’ Back?
In today’s complex B2B sales environment, few sales people can afford to go it alone. Not only do sales people have to manage the customer side of the opportunity, they have to orchestrate the internal side of the opportunity. I’ve been having an interesting email conversation with Eric Koulourath of Invensys about this challenge. He’s presented very interesting discussions of the role of pre-sales as a vital part of the overall sales team. Many of the solutions we present are very complex, requiring management and coordination of a variety of internal resources–marketing, order management, perhaps implementation teams, even engineering or […]
I Won’t Use The Friggin Sales Process!
I seems every time I write a post about the sales process, I get comments that it is not reasonable to force sales people to use the sales process. They include, “forcing someone to use the sales process removes their creativity from the opportunity,” or “I’m an experienced sales person, I know how to do deals, I don’t need to follow any company process,” or “it’s wrong to force high performers to do something different from what they are already doing.” In some ways, I’m sympathetic. If a company has a bad or outdated sales process, then forcing sales people to […]
Is Your Sales Process Producing Results?
The Sales Process is the cornerstone to sales excellence-for both individuals and organizations. Recently, I reread Miller Heiman’s 2010 Best Sales Practices Study. One very interesting result shows that in 94% of World-Class Sales organizations, executive leadership is actively engaged in the sales process. For all other organizations, only 48% had active executive engagement in the sales process. Executive engagement in establishing, leading and coaching a sales process is critical in driving high sales performance. Most businesses continue to struggle to fund business, to make sure they are competing for each opportunity–maximizing their ability to win. The results of the Miller Heiman study […]