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
Obsessing About What Our Customers Think Of Us
One of my favorite wastes of 30 minutes, every Friday, is to listen to Coffee With Brent Adamson and Matt Heinz. (For regular listeners of the show, you will know my tongue is deeply planted in my cheek). Not quoting Brent directly, he raised an issue of: Why are we so obsessed about what customers think of us and our products? It’s a fascinating question. In some ways it’s very natural, as human beings we tend to be self centered, we are driven by our own interests, self interests. So as sellers, it’s natural to carry that same behavior into […]
How Do We Win?
Probably one of the most important questions to sellers, at all levels is, “How do we win?” Probably a close second is, “Can we win enough to achieve our goals?” I’ve written extensively about the latter in my posts on win rates. But, the first question is more fundamental, “How do we win?” Asking a random set of sellers, the answers were unsurprising. Most respond, “We have the best product!” “It’s my superior sales ability!” And when we lose, it’s because of our products, price, competition, but never what we did as sellers. But winning (and losing) about so much […]
We Need To Change The Selling Conversation!!
I just listened to an outstanding webcast on the future of selling, conducted by four close friends. I am a student of their work, they are among the smartest thinkers about selling I’ve ever met. But as I sat through the conversation, I found myself growing increasingly frustrated. It seemed, unconsciously, the conversation around selling gravitates to SaaS selling. It’s not just them, many of the webcasts I participate in, 99.9% of the conversations I see in social media focus on SaaS selling. It seems that SaaS selling has become the center of the universe in virtually all sales conversations. […]
Dumbing Things Down…..
As I look at the plethora of tools we leverage to engage customers and each other, I worry. While they are intended to help us accomplish more. They are intended to help us, make us more efficient, eliminate some of the work we have to do, Instead, I wonder if they are dumbing us down. We have tools that present everything about the customer to us—the financial performance of the company, performance relative to the market, key issues facing them and their customers. While we have information about them and their performance that took time to develop years ago. But […]
Am I Ready For This Meeting?
We spend a huge amount of time getting customers to accept a request for a meeting. Customers are busy. They have an aversion, even a preference, not to talk to sellers. They worry about wasting their time. On our side, we are incredibly busy. We are juggling all sorts of balls, prospecting, managing qualified opportunities in our pipelines, making sure our current customers are happy, doing the endless amount of internal reporting our managers seem to want us to do. The few meetings we can actually get are important and we want to accomplish as much as we can. Recently, […]
Getting What We Want…..
We want to achieve our goals—make quota, get the bonus, get the promotion, get the recognition. We want people to act/behave in a certain way. We want to work for a certain company or in a certain role. We want customers to respond to our outreach, to buy our products. The problem with getting what we want is that we are usually dependent on those we work with getting what they want/need. We can’t get the order until the customer determines they must change, they must do things differently. The toughest part of buying is not solutions selection, but it’s […]