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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
State Of Grace
Forgive my pure indulgence. This is primarily for me to help sort out some thoughts and deal with my profound grief. In the past 18 months, two of the people most important to me have died slowly. The first was my youngest sister, Kathy, who passed away about 18 months ago. The second is my best friend, mentor/hero, and wife of 38 years, Kookie. Kookie passed away two days ago. While I have a profound sense of loss and grief, I am blessed by their examples and what they taught me as they died, slowly. Their lessons in living were […]
Sales And “Product Led Growth”
The world goes through constant cycles. Lately, there have been a lot of “Aha, we’ve discovered the secret” posts and eBooks on Product Led Growth and the role of sales people. We can go back in history, as far as you choose, learning this hot new discovery is actually not very new. We have seen it in mobile devices, PCs, financial services, every segment of software, design tools, analytics, consumer products, food/food service, social platforms, and on and on and on. Let’s face it, Hot Products Sell!! There are certain products/brands, where the products just seem to leap off the […]
When Doing Things Right Is The Wrong Thing
Processes, systems, frameworks are thing that help us do things right. That is, they provide us the ability to more consistently do the things that produce the right outcomes and results. Our selling process helps us more effectively and efficiently align with the customer buying process, producing greater value with the customer. Our account/territory planning processes help us maximize our growth and the results within the accounts/territory. Sales enablement, marketing, and others provide programs and tools that help us grow execute effectively. For example, sales enablement might provide onboarding programs that both reduce the ramp time to productivity, and the […]
Wearing A Blue Suit Drives Higher Win Rates
Periodically, we do deep research on what drives winning. A couple of years ago, I revealed some of the research in, “In Examining 27,357 Wins, 95% Of Sales People Did This One Thing.” Those conclusions are still valid. But we’ve learned some new thing. One of the most remarkable observations is that wearing a Blue Suit drives win rates that are about 2+ times higher than any other color suit. Digging into the research, I always wear suits in calling on customers. (Yeah, I’m very old school.) I have 5 blue suits and two grey suits. I rotate them, so […]
Time Available For Selling
Without a doubt, sales people have a lot of things that distract them from being engaged with customers. The majority is probably imposed by their companies, a lot is self imposed (read avoidance and excuses). We want to reduce and eliminate as many of these time drains as possible. We impose a lot of administrivia and reporting on our sales people. Simplifying our business processes, leveraging tools, technologies, are just simply stopping doing things enable us to recover a lot of time for selling. We can eliminate or reduce a lot of those things we need to do to prepare […]
When The Incremental Cost Of Stupidity Is $0
I’m at the ripe young age where I have seen a lot of different scenarios for marketing, demand gen, lead gen, and prospecting. In the “old days,” many of our techniques were oriented around F2F, direct marketing, and telephone calls. We looked at the cost of every program we conducted, managing to a certain budget or cost per qualified lead. In F2F, we had the time of the sales person, the travel expense and so forth. With marketing programs, direct marketing was king. We’d look at the cost of developing the program, the cost of printing the collateral, and the […]