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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
SDRs And AEs, Do We Have Things Backwards?
I’ve always had a contrarian opinion about the roles of SDRs and AEs. While these roles can be very important, often, I think we have our ideas about these roles backwards. As a result, we set both up for failure. First, let me focus the discussion. For highly transactional, inbound buying. Perhaps the current approach works. It might work better, though. But for complex B2B, particularly outbound, the model is set up for failure. Of course, many of you will talk about your success in implementing this, but I suspect you could be much more successful. And the data shows […]
Do Your Sellers Know How To Converse With Your Customers?
I spend a lot of time in non-English speaking countries. My French and German are, barely passable. Sometimes, I struggle a little in Ireland, Australia, and the UK (Yes, they are non-English American speaking countries 😉 I spend a lot of time in the Nordics and Northern European countries. Fortunately, they speak English better than I. But then there’s the Far East. I can’t “talk to” my clients in China, Korea, Japan, or Southeast Asia. This inability to talk to these clients can be crippling. Even though, there is someone translating, it’s really difficult to really understand and connect with […]
Problem Solvers Or Problem Responders?
One of the great joys of working with sellers and leaders is that, generally, we are people of action. A core part of our jobs is solving problems. Whether it’s helping our customers solve their problems and grow, or doing the same around our own performance or growth. We tend to be proud of our ability to leap into action, responding to a customer’s query, or taking action on new growth opportunities. As managers, our job is to solve problems. Again, we leap into action to address them, but too often that response looks like “Ready, fire, aim……” Are we […]
Oh No! It’s A RFP?!?
I recognize that I’m jumping around in my continued series on “Things we thought we understood about selling, but really don’t.” Today’s topic is RFPs. Normally, I do everything I can to ignore these, but in talking to clients, I realize how misunderstood these are, and how poorly we leverage the RFP process. First, I have to confess a bias. We never respond to a RFP that we haven’t written! While that sounds arrogant, it illustrates the key point we miss about RFPs and managing them. Recently, I spoke to a VP of Sales. He said, “Most of our business […]
Are Your Customers Doing Their Homework?
Hank Barnes’ research on buyer remorse (and other things) is some of the most important research for sellers to understand. He recently wrote a post, “Who Is Responsible For Expectations?” It’s best to read his research, but a net summary of one of his points is, “Buyers who have put less time in doing their homework, up front; those that engage only at a superficial level, have a much higher degree of remorse, for those decisions they make.” This is a key issue, if your customer isn’t committed to doing the work, if they are taking shortcuts through their buying […]
Isn’t It All About The Buying Process?
Yesterday, I published a rather long article on the Selling Process. It’s part of my series of articles about “Things We Thought We Understood About Selling But Really Didn’t.” Apologies, the article was rather long, but the selling process is so important. Understanding it, executing it well is the cornerstone to our success. In recent years, we’ve acknowledged the concept of a customer Buying Process. Many have argued abandoning the Selling Process, focusing on the Buying Process, in the least we must align the selling process with the buying process. We even create charts of the stages customers go through, […]