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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
“Customers Only Spend 5% Of Their Time With Sellers!”
I read a post from a “thought leader.” If focused on how profoundly selling is changing—Wow, I’ve never heard that before. It focused on buyers spending less time with sales people, quoting a Gartner survey, suggesting they get their information from other sources. It concluded that we have to change, that we had to figure more/different ways to engage customers getting more of their mindshare. All the points are true–sort of. Gartner, has published post using the 5% figure as an eye grabbing lead. But you have to dive into the research to understand it The research actually shows, buying […]
Sales Conversations?
Everyday I read articles about how to conduct sales conversations. They get into topics like, “do you start with ‘How are you…,’” They extend into the exact sentence structure, use these words, don’t use these, counter with this, use these pattern interrupts, here are the sequences. There is discussion about authenticity, which often seems to be faux authenticity; sometimes accompanied by recommendations on mirroring, facial expressions, and so forth. The tricks, gimmicks, and techniques around this specialized segment of “conversations,” seems to go on and on and on…… We even have tools that are supposed to guide us on having […]
Is There A Selling Career Path?
Recently, I had a fascinating conversation with a client. We talked about something I rarely hear managers discussing, and something I don’t see pundits commenting on. The topic was, “What kind of career path options do we want to develop for our people? How do we challenge and retain our people longer? How can we enable them to contribute at higher levels?” It’s remarkable because it flies in the face of “conventional wisdom practice” in business. It seems that selling jobs, at all levels, are viewed as “temp” jobs. It’s an interesting phenomena, retention is not an “A” priority for […]
Buying Is Human……
Some readers will look at this title, thinking, “Here Dave goes, getting all philosophical on us….” But, if we are to succeed as sellers, it probably pays for us to better understand buyers. We know all sorts of things that go on in buyer’s minds. Lately, we’ve heard a lot about FOMO and FOMU. We know buyers struggle with deciding, they struggle in their buying groups in reaching/maintaining consensus. We know they struggle to make sense of the conflicting information that deluges them through their buying process. We know decision confidence is a huge concern. We know, after they have […]
Foundations Of Value Creation
Customers buy value, not price! We know the importance of creating a strong value proposition–something differentiated from the alternatives. Something that has great meaning to the customer. We know that if customers don’t realize that value, we won’t maintain the relationship. They may have remorse with the decision, they may choose not to renew or grow. Over the past few years, we’ve begun to learn the most important area of value creation has less to do with our solutions, but more to do with how sellers help customers in their problem solving process. Inciting customers to change, helping them recognize […]
Should Sellers Do Their Own Research?
I see a lot of discussions about “forcing sellers to waste selling time by doing their own research.” Increasingly, I see people recommending outsourcing this research, freeing the time up to make more calls. Clearly, too many sales people don’t know how to do research, as a result, they waste a lot of time. There are many that don’t leverage the tools effectively. So there is a lot of room for improvement in the research that sales people do. But I would never take the research responsibility away from the sellers, whether they are SDRs, AEs, or some other role. […]