Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Prospecting Differentiation
We want our prospecting efforts with customers to stand out. To, somehow, differentiate ourselves from the dozens of other prospecting calls or emails our customers receive. Unfortunately, our efforts at differentiation tend to focus on the wrong thing—we focus on us–ourselves, our companies, what we sell. This leads our prospecting conversations to discussions about us: “This is what we do…..”“This is what we sell…..”“This is how great our company is….”“These are the people/companies we work with…..”“This is how we are different……” All of a sudden, a call that is supposed to be about the customer is translated into a monologue […]
Driving Growth
Every executive I speak wants to see growth in their businesses. Growth drives revenue, it provides funding for new product or market development, which in turn drives more growth. As sales and marketing professionals, it’s our responsibility to identify and pursue those growth opportunities. But we miss so much! Matt Heinz referenced Gartner data in a recent LinkedIn post. It ‘s a provocative post, call this one “jumping on Matt’s bandwagon.” The first interesting data point is: In looking at our addressable markets, at any one time, only 3-4% are active buyers. Some might view this as very small, but […]
Compressing Our Customer’s Buying Process
I read a post about influencing and accelerating our customers’ buying decisions. The author thought trying to acclerate or “move in” the buying decision was wrong. I don’t disagree–usually, our motives for trying to do this is getting an order and making out numbers. Toward the end of a month or quarter, managers seem to always focus on, “What can we move in?” Often, we provide “incentives,” to accelerate a customers decision, usually those are some form of discount (Ironically, we are training our customers on behaviors that get the discounts. If I were a customer, out of principle, I […]
Focusing On The “Mobilizer” Is Not Enough!
We know in complex B2B buying decisions, there are over 10 people involved in making the decision. There are many others who influence this group, and it only takes 1 person to veto a buying decision. Ideally, we have at least one “Mobilizer,” some one within the buying group that is proactively advocating for our solution. But focusing our sales efforts on that Mobilizer is insufficient to drive success. More typically, we focus all our sales efforts on the person we know–whether that person is a mobilizer, or just the person we know. We put all our “eggs” into this […]
Are You Selling What You Can Sell Or Selling What You Need To Sell?
Most sales people I meet are genuinely busy. They are trying to meet new customers, find new deals, qualify them, move them to closure. It seems to be almost a badge of honor when I speak to sales people, to proclaim the long hours and hard work. Sometimes, they proudly proclaim, “I’m selling everything I can!” And that’s a problem for me. Typically, when someone proudly states they are “selling everything they can,” they aren’t selling what they need to be selling. Stated differently, they are trying hard, but their quotas and goals are not front and center. As sales […]
“The Customer Is Incompetent!”
In the past week, I’ve participated in two reviews where the sales person has made the statement about some individual in the buying group, “So and so is incompetent…..” One wanted to hammer home the fact by saying, “I spoke to a friend selling other products to the same company, he agrees….So and So is incompetent!” It was, apparently, validation for that sales person’s position. Naturally, statements like these provoke the question, “What is it about that person’s behavior that causes you to draw that conclusion?” Usually, there is a lot of hemming, hawing, and hand waving, followed by, “I […]