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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
What’s The Most Pressing Part Of The Sales Process Today?
Recently, I was having a conversation with a good friend and colleague. He asked me the question, “Dave, what to you think is the biggest problem area for B2B sales people in generating business today?” I’m a little slow, I asked, “George, what do you mean?” He responded, “Well if you look at much of the press and social media, it’s prospecting or top of the pipeline, lead to opportunity conversion…..” “But,” he went on, “some say it’s the inability to navigate the selling/buying process on qualified deals….” “Others say it’s the inability to articulate and defend a differentiated value […]
Authenticity
Authenticity has become a buzzword tossed around social media too casually. We aspire to be authentic, we claim we are authentic. Or, at least, I’ve never met someone who claims to be inauthentic–though I suspect many of those who claim authenticity but are actually inauthentic. What is authenticity? To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, I know it when I experience it. Sometime, I think we confuse authenticity with our style or our personal branding. We may present ourselves a certain way, we may have a persona we present to others, for example the language we use, how we dress, the enthusiasm […]
The Buyer’s Journey, One Step At A Time
Most sales people focus on the outcome of the deal. They want to get to the close and an order as fast as possible. Managers constantly reinforce this rush to completion in their “coaching conversations,” by asking, “When are we going to get this deal?” or “We need this to close this quarter!” Everything we do is focused on jumping to the end of the buying process. We start pitching our solution before we even understand what the customer is trying to achieve. We try to present the value the customer might get, before we understand what the customer values. […]
Doing What We’ve Always Done, When Everything Else Has Changed
I’m constantly amazed conversations I have with otherwise smart people. Usually, they start with some sort of challenge they are having: We aren’t growing at the rate we need to grow. We aren’t hitting out numbers. The markets have changed dramatically. Our competition has changed. Our customers are changing. Our budgets are smaller, we don’t have the resources we used to. There are number of issues people identify. Once they have done that, I ask, “What are you doing about those things?” Usually, there’s a long pause in the conversation. Sometimes people say: We’ve upped the pressure on our people […]
Transactional Versus Complex Selling
We glibly toss around phrases like “We have a transactional selling process,” or, “Ours is a complex selling process.” Often, there is some preening around those making the latter statement, thinking “Real sales people do complex deals!” Recently, I lurked in a conversation, suddenly realizing, while we glibly talk about these types of selling processes, there’s a lot of misunderstanding of them. There are probably a lot of valid definitions, but I’ll try to toss out my perspective with some thoughts. Too often we try to distinguish transactional and complex by average deal size, thinking transactional deals are much smaller […]
Why Are You Calling Now?
This morning, I’m doing work in a rare day in the office. A sales person calls. He’s actually pretty interesting, but I pause him mid-pitch, asking, “What caused you to call me now? Is there something that caused you to think it’s critical for us to talk about the issue this week, versus in 6-9 months.” I have to credit the sales person, he was at least honest with me, “Your company is on my call list for today, but I don’t know what you might be interested in…..” We know why we, as sales people, want to call people […]