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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
The Coming Sales Talent Crisis, Part 2
I wrote The Coming Sales Talent Crisis, focusing on the struggles our customers face in their buying journey. We are all painfully aware of the struggles they face in solving problems and buying. We know that less than 50% result in a buying decision. We know our customers need help-less in understanding our products and solutions, but in helping them navigate their buying process. This process is complex. Helping our customers requires new sales skills. The traditional solutions and consultative selling skills become table stakes. But new skills, including, curiosity, critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, facilitation, project management, and resource […]
The Coming Sales Talent Crisis
It’s clear that customers struggle to buy. The majority of complex B2B buying journeys end in no decision made. What we traditionally thought of as a relatively linear journey is now depicted as shown below. It turns out the challenge in B2B buying is not what we have traditionally thought, or what we have trained our people do to: Help the customer select a solution (Ideally ours). Our customers struggle. They are trying to solve a problem, part of that involves buying something. But they struggle to align agendas, priorities, to identify how they will make a decision. They start, […]
Our Numbers Aren’t Laws Of Physics!
We tend to think of the Laws Of Physics as fundamental truths about how things behave.* For example, F=M x A (Force is equal to Mass times Acceleration). We always calculate force using this formula, it is universal. These Laws represent fundamental behaviors of objects and very predictable properties. Somehow, we seem to treat many of the numbers we use in sales and marketing as “fundamental and unchangeable truths.” We accept them, we accept the mathematical relationship, and all our behaviors are driven by those relationships. We have all sorts of metrics we look at: Pipeline coverage, win rates, average […]
Our Customers Include Microsoft, Google, Siemens….
Daily, I’m inundated with emails, InMails, phone calls from sales people trying to catch my attention. Inevitably, at some point, a reference is made to the customers of the company that is trying to sell me something. They always are the names of some of the largest, most respected or envied organizations in the world. Somehow, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Siemens, Citigroup, SAP, Amazon, and others are always cited. Or sit in a conference room as a sales person goes through their deck pitching you. The “corporate ego” slides always include the “logo” slide. Usually it’s the third or fourth slides […]
Win/Loss Reviews
One of the key questions I ask when I meet with sales executives and sales people is, “What causes you to win, what causes you to lose?” Often, I ask to see any data and analysis they have on wins and losses. A couple of things happen: Surprisingly, people don’t know the answers. Yes there are anecdotes, “We were involved in this situation….” They are either the single greatest success or the single greatest loss. But they fundamentally can’t answer the question about their typical deals because they haven’t asked the question themselves. Alternatively, they spin a report out of […]
Never Respond To An RFP That You Didn’t Write!
At a kickoff meeting earlier this week, I was having a disturbing conversation with a group of sales people. It seemed a big part of their “prospecting,” was trolling customers for RFPs and RFIs. I probed them on this, their response was, “It’s so easy, these are people who already want to buy, they’ve put together their requirements, all we have to do is just respond to the RFPs! It’s pretty easy to chase after them!” I asked, “What’s your win rate, what’s the quality of the deal (i.e. are you winning through pricing)?” Things got a little sketchy, a […]