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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
Data, Data, Everywhere…….
In Samuel Coleridge’s The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, there’s a famous line, “Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.” Today, we seem to face the same thing in selling, except now it’s data. We have more ability to collect data, about customers, about the performance of our marketing initiatives, about the performance of our sales people. We have terabytes of data we’ve never been able to collect, we’ve technology platforms and tools that enable us to leverage this data in very powerful ways. One would think the availability of this data, implementing these tools would drive huge advances […]
Will AI Replace Sellers?
Looking through my feeds, today, it seems people are fixated on ChatGPT and similar tools. More importantly, people are asking the question and taking surveys on the topic, “Will AI replace sales people?” I guess, having so many years working in selling and with sellers, these questions provoke a bored yawn. Been here, done that…… While before my time, I suspect people asked, “Catalogs replace the need for…” or “Will the telephone replace the need for door to door sales people….” or “Will email replace the need for….” or “Will the web replace the need for …..” We seem to […]
Sales People Need To Be Subject Matter Experts!
I don’t think anyone would disagree with the statement, “Sales people need to be subject matter experts.” The real issue is in what? Many would argue that sellers have to be experts in the products they sell. I get it, I’m not sure if I disagree, but when there are so many alternative ways for customers to understand products, one wonders, “Is this the most important area of expertise?” We could look at it differently, perhaps posing the question, “What expertise do customers most value?” Once we understand this, then we might think, if building seller expertise in these areas […]
Understanding The Problem
We get the Discovery process wrong–period, full stop. Most of the time we actually fail to do discovery. Look at your inbox, I suspect 95% of the prospecting mails you have say, “Organizations like yours have this problem–we solve it. Our product has these capabilities…..” They end it by asking to schedule a meeting or demo. These sellers never try to discover the problem, they assume the problem that supports their pitch. When we do try to do discovery, too often it’s “discovery with an agenda.” We ask questions that enable us to immediately switch the conversation to our solution. […]
Leveraging Deal Size And Sales Cycle
I’ve been writing a series looking, ultimately, at pipeline management. I’ve written about Win Rates, Pipeline Integrity. In this post, I’ll cover two more aspects of pipeline management, Average Deal Size and Average Sales Cycle. To understand our qualified pipelines, we have to know our win rates, average deal size, and sales cycle. Before we start analyzing the pipeline we have to make sure we have a high integrity pipeline. Pipelines filled with garbage are meaningless–none of the analysis we provide will be accurate or helpful. Average deal size is pretty simple, it comes from an analysis of your past […]
Coaching Is A Language!
I wish I were smart enough to be the originator of this term, “Coaching is a language…” All credit goes to Aaron Evans for this term. Coaching is not something we do, it’s not a meeting we schedule with the people we are responsible for. It’s not a specific activity, though we tend to treat coaching as this. High impact coaching permeates every conversation we have. Whether it’s some sort of review, water cooler/Starbuck’s conversations, “windshield” time. Coaching is a language we speak, every day, every meeting, every conversation.. Just as we may conduct meetings in many different languages–English, Mandarin, […]