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
On Sequences And “Touches”
The research tells us we need to be persistent in our outreaches to prospects and clients. To reach and engage them, we have to leverage multiple channels of engagement. Phone, email, social, texts, and other channels must be leveraged simultaneously to provoke a prospect–even a customer to respond. Data shows we often need to reach out over 15 times to catch the attention of prospects. Years ago, it used to be 7-10 outreaches, now it’s over 15, who knows where it will be next year. We’ve even created the “sequences” to provoke prospect engagement. The concept is powerful, building a […]
And We Call This Progress?
This time of year, sometimes we look back to see what’s happened how things have changed and the progress we’ve made. Typically, we look at attainment of annual goals. Questions like, “Will we hit our numbers? Could we have done more or what cause us to miss? Have we built a stronger team, are we growing their ability to perform? What challenges did we face, how did we address them? Are we maximizing performance and productivity in the organization? These help us understand what has happened and how we responded. It also helps us think about what we want to […]
The Problem With Inbound
We rely too much on Inbound leads to achieve our goals! Our prospecting strategies are dominated by creating Inbound demand that sellers respond to. Whether it’s emails, social visibility, SEO, or anything else, the focus is on getting buyers to take the initiative to reach us. Inevitably, inbound is never sufficient. We ramp up our outreach to drive more inbound activity–more of all of the above…… Then, reluctantly, we put in place some outbound activities. We create volumes of dials, scripts, sequences focused on, “buy my product.” Let’s set aside, for a moment the challenges we face with generating sufficient […]
Can You “Connect The Dots” With Your Customer?
Every function, every job in an organization is somehow connected with their organization’s strategies, goals, and objectives. Every organization has goals—revenue, earnings, growth, market penetration, geographic penetration, product/offering growth, how they are perceived by customers, how they are perceived in their communities, expansion, competitive positioning, and on and on. The top executives and boards establish these goals and objectives. In turn they translate to goals for each functional organization, engineering/product development has goals/objectives that contribute to the corporate goals. Manufacturing, service delivery, customer support, finance, operations, marketing, sales each have goals that contribute to those of the organization. Yes, even […]
What If Buyers Were Better Buyers?
Buyers struggle doing their “jobs” ……buying! We poor sellers struggle, if it weren’t for these inept buyers, selling would be so much easier. Just reflect for a moment. We know 60% of committed buying processes end in no decision made. For those that make a decision, we know there is a high level of decision regret, particularly with those who have rep-free buying experiences (Thanks to Hank Barnes’ research). And we know the buying process is complicated, going through starts/stops, wandering, shifts in priorities/directions. Just remember the old Gartner “spaghetti chart.” We spend billions in teaching sellers how to sell, […]
Onboarding New Managers
We spend lots of time and money focusing on onboarding new sellers. We provide training, tools, content to reduce their ramp time. Managers spend time helping them become productive. Ironically, we provide very little in the way of onboarding new managers, particularly new front line sales managers. Typically, the process is: “Lisa, congrats on moving into the front line sales manager role…… I need an updated forecast by Tuesday!” Managers are thrown into the role with little training and, too often, little understanding of their new role. As a result, it shouldn’t be a surprise they fall back to what […]