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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
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 […]
Freeing Up “Time To Sell,” A Quandary
Since the earliest days of selling, our vision is to free up sellers time to sell! Ideally, we’d like them to spend 100% of their time working with prospects and customers, helping them navigate their buying processes. But things keep creeping in, some valuable, some wastes of time. But they infringe on our dream of having sellers working 7×24 with customers. There are some necessary things–training and development to improve our ability to sell. Certain internal meetings to keep us up to date with strategies, priorities, and what’s happening with the company. Coaching–when it’s done–to help us improve our abilities […]
Confidence Eroders
Hank Barnes has been writing a fantastic series of articles focusing on Decision Confidence. One of the reasons I’m so fascinated by the article is Hank is directly appealing to my mathy-science nerdiness. Long time readers will know I often try to codify issues around mathematical equations. Hank has generated an equation on Decision Confidence: His variables are: CB = Confidence Builders V = Validation E = Level of Effort required to confirm the confidence builder. CE = Confidence Eroders I = Impact. The formula is very elegant and provokes a lot of reflection. It approaches the elegance of Einstein’s […]
Sales Innovation
Yes, I know the majority of you, justifiably, will think this title is an oxymoron. Something like jumbo shrimp, virtual reality, exact estimate, definite maybe, short meetings, job security, detailed summary, Microsoft Works (oops). This impression is reinforced by the imitative behaviors we constantly see in selling, focused on doing more of what we know doesn’t work, but doing it because that’s what everyone does. We continue to focus on pitching products, when we know we have to focus on the customer business problems. We know we have to engage customers in things they care about, yet we focus on […]
“But The Competitors’ Prices Are Less Than Ours…..”
My post, Games Sellers Play, Pricing/Discounting, generated a lot of interesting conversation and questions. One pervasive question was, “How do I compete against competitors whose price is less than ours?” Some of the discussions asked about matching prices or coming up with standard discounting, or how to find other ways to match or beat the competitors pricing. We could even extend the argument to, “our competitors have more features and functions than us, how do we compete against that?” Unless your company strategy is always to be the low price supplier (it’s hard to build a high growth/high profit business […]
We’re Long Past Our “Use By Date”
I love both my sisters dearly. But one had the most annoying habit. When she visited, she took great joy in helping prepare meals. But every once in a while, she would see an ingredient, say a can of some type of food. She would check the can for the “Use by date.” If, for instance, it was late November–Thanksgiving — she saw a can of cranberry sauce with a use by date of October of that year, she would throw it out and go to the store to buy a new can. And finding one thing that had expired […]