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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
Talking To Customers
As sellers, our job is to talk to customers. But apparently we do a very bad job at it. Research report after research report say the same things: The majority of customers prefer a rep-free buying experience. Over 83% (and climbing) prefer to learn about products/solutions without involving a seller.For those that do involve sellers, they minimize the time they invest. Currently, it’s around 17% for all sellers–not just us, but our competitors.Customers say sellers waste their time. Sellers don’t understand the customer and the business, they don’t talk about what the customer cares about.They only talk about their products/solutions, […]
Differentiating Skills: Curiosity, Generosity, Humanity
I’m a big fan of Scott Osman’s writing on leadership. Recently, he wrote an outstanding article on Showing Up. Be sure to read it. In it, he talks about three characteristics of inspirational leaders: Curiosity, Generosity, Humanity. I wanted to do a deeper dive into this and it’s importance. First, I’m sure Scott would agree, leadership is not limited to executive titles. In the context he speaks of, leadership is displayed in all levels of and organization, and is independent of management positions. And as I look to sellers that are consistent high performers, these characteristics dominate how they work. […]
Making Winning Easier!
Let me be clear, in today’s environment winning is never easy. But we make things so complicated, we make it much harder than it should be. As a result, our win rates and results plummet. Some thoughts: Never never never, regardless how tempting, never ever venture outside your ICP! The ICP is the set of customers that have the problems we are the best in the world at solving. Focusing on your ICP in your prospecting and throughout your qualification process means you are doing everything you can to “pre-program” things for success. When things get tough, for instance the […]
How Important Is This To Your Customer?
As we look at our customers’ problem solving/buying processes, a key question both we and they must consider is, “How important is this project?” Some of you may be scratching your heads, thinking, “If they are in a committed buying effort, why wouldn’t it be important to them?” We know the foundational qualifying principles is, “The pain of doing nothing must be greater than the pain of change.” They must understand the consequences of not implementing the solution by the date they have targeted. Without this, it isn’t a qualified opportunity, and we are pushing a rope up a very […]
Zombie Pipelines
Over the course of my career I’ve looked at thousands of pipelines/funnels. Most are pretty bleak, they don’t have enough opportunities to achieve their goals. Recently, I was in a meeting discussing the pipeline health. The managers, defensively, responded, “Dave, we know we need to get more in our pipelines. We are driving prospecting activities to load the pipeline…. Everyone knows they have to get to 3X pipelines within the next 60 days…..” I replied, “But your win rate is 21%, you need roughly a 5X pipeline to even begin addressing the challenge. But there’s more. As I look at […]
Win Rate Hacks
Long time readers know I tend to be obsessed with Win Rates. My obsession would seem to be obvious and, more importantly, shared. For some strange reason, the majority of sellers and managers don’t share this obsession. They want to win, of course, but too many don’t pay attention to win rates. We see this in report after report showing win rates in the high teens–generally 15-20%. And when I talk to people about it, they shrug their shoulders, some how they think win rates are a constant in nature. And they see their competitors having similar win rates so […]