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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
Selling Process and Sales Methodology…….
Virtually every organization I work with has a real misunderstanding of Selling Processes and Sales Methodologies. Both are critical, and while complementary, they serve very different purposes. And, I think, training companies and consultants (like me), sometimes confuse these issues, not serving our clients as effectively as we should. At the risk of oversimplifying the difference. The Selling Process focuses on the “why and what” of how we engage customers in helping them navigate their buying process. A Sales Methodology focuses on “how” we execute our Selling Process. They provide us tools to facilitate our ability to effectively execute the […]
On Reflection…….
“We do not learn from experience, We learn from reflecting on experience.” John Dewey, American Philosopher/Psychologist. This was the opening line in one of the best posts I’ve read recently. It’s from the brilliant Suzi McAlpine, be sure to read the post: 5 ways you can build in reflection to improve performance. This is such an important principle for all of us in selling and leadership, but somehow we seem so preoccupied with activity and busyness, we fail to take the time to reflect and learn from those. We measure our success on volumes and velocity of outreaches. Yet those […]
Coaching And Developing Managers
We (including me) spend a lot of time talking about the importance of coaching/developing our people. Unfortunately, high impact coaching is rarely done. If we “coach,” too often, it isn’t a collaborative discovery/learning process. Instead, it is information sharing or an update on something–perhaps a deal, an account, the pipeline. It is usually met with a lot of direction, “go do these things, let me know how it goes….” When I reflect on this challenge, I wonder why are we so bad at this. There are lots of great books (including Sales Manager Survival Guide), there are a lot of […]
The Problem With The Selling/Buying Process
Recently, sitting with a sales management team, we started discussing the “Sales Process.” They displayed their sales process. As you might expect, the process was divided int a number of stages. Things like prospecting, qualifying, discovering, proposing, closing. (Theirs actually had different labels and a couple of additional stages). As is typical of most sales processes I look at, this process described all the things they needed to do to the customer to persuade them to buy their solutions. They included the usual things, understanding budgets, understanding who is involved, identifying the key decisionmaker and influencers, determining their needs, demoing […]
Do You Believe Your Value Proposition?
I’m amazed at the number of sellers that really don’t believe their value proposition or value creation. How do I know this? They don’t know enough about what I’m trying to achieve to be able to articulate and quantify the value I should expect from their solution. They answer concerns I have with product capabilities, not what the solution means to me and my organization and what we are trying to achieve. They can’t challenge me with the impact of doing nothing, not changing. They keep pitching the product and what the product does. They can’t address my concerns on […]
Freeing Up Time To Sell!
I’m, more frequently, involved in discussions around “time available for selling.” Increasingly, more “stuff” seems to be occupying sellers time, diverting them from engaging with customers in their buying processes. Part of it is increasing complexity of our solutions and businesses. We may spend a lot of time, internally, configuring and making sure we can support what we are selling. As more people are involved in selling complex solutions, we spend more time coordinating and planning with them. There are endless demands on our time for meetings, some that are high value and some that are worthless, but they suck […]