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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
Making B2B Buying More Like Amazon…..
I got one of those emails today. Somebody wanted to talk to me about the consumerization of B2B buying and selling. The sender had the position that, “most B2B transactions like buying, selling, and customer onboarding will feel the same as B2C transactions today – asynchronous, delightful, and quick.” Well, yes……. and no. This oversimplifies B2B buying, missing the real challenges and differences between B2B and B2C. Over the past 10 years, we have seen the consumerization of B2B selling. We can learn a lot from consumer product selling, applying some of the approaches to B2B selling. There are parts […]
Sales Call Planning……
I know at least 80% of the people seeing this title are probably rolling their eyes thinking, “Why are we talking about this?” Some will be thinking, “I have my scripts, all I have to do is stick to the script…..” Others will think, “I’m experienced, I’ve made 1000s of calls, I know what to do……” But customers, at least 72% would prefer not talking to a sales person—ever! Others complain, “All they talk about is their products, they don’t talk about what I want to talk about…..” “They don’t understand my business….. They don’t understand their products……” For those […]
Nothing Works Anymore!
It seems all the things we used to do; the things that engaged customers and prospects, the things we knew would produce results, the things that drove our growth; no longer work. All the time we invested in messaging, targeting, personalizing. All the tools we implemented to help us do these things. The structures and organizations we put in place to execute our prospecting, customer engagement, and opportunity management strategies. None of these are working the way they used to. And our current solution to this issue—doing more, faster—is failing even faster. All the things that worked, now seem to […]
What About Our Competitors???
We are obsessed with our competition. We study them and their strategies. We compare them, their solutions, their capabilities to ours. We read their reviews, reveling over the customer complaints, trying to figure out how to leverage them into our strategies. We develop playbooks and battlecards to help position ourselves. And then there’s the comparison checklists on our websites. You know the one’s I’m talking about. They present a long list of features and capabilities of our products, often very obscure like, “Sponsors grade school soccer teams….” Then our products are positioned in the first column with the competitors products […]
What Problem Is Your Customer Trying To Solve?
My friend Hank Barnes wrote an outstanding post, Clarifying Objectives To Gain Consensus. In the post, he outlined a major reason customers struggle with buying is because of conflicting objectives within the buying team. We shouldn’t be surprised by this, yet, based on some of the discussion it seems we are. Let me give an analogy, we all know the example of how a group of blind people arrayed around an elephant describe it very differently. To some it’s a snake, to others it may be a fan, to another it may be a wall. None is necessarily wrong, they […]
Pipeline Management
The sales pipeline is, perhaps, one of the most misunderstood things in selling. We know the pipeline is critical to helping us answer the question, “Are we pursuing enough opportunities to achieve our goals?” We harass sellers to use CRM, keeping their opportunities updated so we can track our pipelines. Yet, too often, they are very inaccurate, gamed, or we don’t understand what the pipeline is telling us. As a result, one of the most useful tools for understanding and managing performance, is not used to it’s full power. Over the past few weeks, I’ve written a number of articles […]