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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
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 […]
ChatGPT Is Getting Pissed Off!
I enjoy my conversations with my friend ChatGPT. She often provokes me to think differently, raising different arguments and perspectives when prompted. I’ve been inundated with prospecting outreaches with people leveraging ChatGPT to amplify their incompetence. I had been ignoring past emails that were obviously done poorly through ChatGPT, but the one cited below intrigued me. The author was too lazy to take the text generated by ChatGPT and constuct a senseless email. Instead, she pawned off her stupidity on ChatGPT by copying the response it generated. I wondered, does ChatGPT get upset with being utilized by imcompetents? Does it […]
Intuitive Selling—More Than A Feeling
Have you ever experienced talking about an opportunity, a situation, or strategy with a very high performing sales person? Or been with someone dealing with a very complex deal, and all of a sudden they come up with the right answers, or strategies? Or that individual that just seems to always have the right answers for dealing with the tough situations? Seemingly, they pull the answers from thin air, but they are, almost always, right on target. Somehow they “get” everything in a flash and manage to perform at levels, many of us aspire to. When you ask them, they […]
Do They Have Budget???
“Do they have budget,” is a fundamental qualifying question for every seller. We have all sorts of tricks/techniques for determining this. There’s the old standby, “What were you planning to spend?” Alternatively, the direct approach, “How much have you budgeted for this project?” Or if we are selling XaaS, “As you know our standard pricing is $X per user, how many seats are you funded to support?” Sometimes, particularly in more complex situations, we ask “Is this project funded, ” or “How are you getting funding for the project?” We spend a lot of time trying to figure out if […]
Our Customers Aren’t On A Buying Journey…
Most of the time, as sellers, we focus on our self interests. As a result we spend a lot of time looking at our selling process and the things we want to do to our customers. We focus on the things that drive our success, perhaps not really understanding what the customer is trying to achieve and their success. Sometimes, though rarely, we think about their buying process. But usually we think about it in the context of things we think they should be doing to make it easier for us to sell to them. We design their activities as […]
Sales Process, It’s Not What We Do To Our Customers….
When I sit down with sales organizations, we inevitably spend a lot of time talking about the Sales Process. There are always so many issues that come up in these discussions, I’ll cover these in this series. But one of the most fundamental problems I see is these sales processes are internally focused, always looking at the things we Do To Our Customers. There are all sorts of activities, separated by stages, focusing on what we inflict on our customers. We: Qualify them. Discover their needs. Re-qualify them. Find out who’s involved in the decision process. Focus on identifying the […]