Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Automating Stupidity
I have a very good friend, Dr. Howard Dover. He does wickedly smart things in driving the sales curriculum at UT Dallas. Every once in a while, I get terribly frustrated and need to vent and Howard lets me vent. I was venting on the mindless focus on activity. Activity for activity sake, with no concern about the results these activities create–the goal has become activity. I read an article, “Can your sales people complete 120K activities a year?” There was some data that normal sales people are a fraction of that. These articles somehow only seem to talk about […]
Project Management And Sales?
What’s selling have to do with project management? It may not be obvious, but strong project management skills are essential for top performing sales people—both for helping our customers buy and for effectively leveraging our own resources in the process. Think about it, a moment. Our customers have a project–not a buying journey. They need to implement a new financial system, acquire new machine tools, implement a new IT infrastructure, design/build/ship a new product. Each of these is a collection of projects. They have defined goals, a deadline for completing the project, a lot of activities required to complete the […]
Putting You Money Where Your Mouth Is!
I’ve been working with sales professionals (and unprofessionals) for more years than I’d like to think about. I talk to and work with thousands of sales people and hundreds of managers every year, traveling a couple hundred thousand miles doing it. So it’s easy to get jaded when you sit in sales meetings. Despite, different times, companies, industries, geographies, too often one hears the same thing over and over. Too often, it’s the same whining accompanied by, “If only ……” statements. Last week, I had the privilege of sitting in the single best sales meeting of my career–even those I […]
Customers Don’t Care About Their Buying Journey!
Recently, I was speaking with an executive whose team was involved in a major purchase decision. I asked him to describe his buying process/journey. He looked at me with an amused/quizzical look. “We don’t think in terms of a buying journey. We just have something we need to get done, part of it involves buying…..” All of a sudden, it struck me: The buying process or buying journey is just an artifact invented by marketers and sellers to rationalize what we want to inflict on the customers. Of course I’m being a little harsh here, customers do talk in terms […]
Doing More Of What Doesn’t Work!
Imagine sitting in some sort of sales kickoff meeting or conference, and the keynote speaker enthusiastically jumps on the stage and shouts, “You need to do more of what doesn’t work!” Your initial reaction might be, “WTF!?!??” But the speaker continues, pacing back and forth, showing great slides, extorting you to do more of what doesn’t work. You’d think the speaker is insane, he’s not, after all he’s gotten your money (but that’s another post). The smart people in the audience would walk out, thinking, this is a waste of time! Yet, I see organization after organization committed to doing […]
Moving Beyond The “Chaotic Buying Process”
It seems in recent months, the sales and marketing world is suddenly waking up to the fact the buying process/journey is not a linear process. That customers don’t go through an orderly process of: 1. Define problem, 2. Identify priorities, requirements, 3. Assess solutions, 4. Select solution, 5. Implement. It seems we are suddenly recognizing that customers struggle in buying, they wander, they start/stop, the majority of buying decisions end in “no decision made.” Even though people have been writing and talking about this for some time, it seems to be sinking in and many organizations are recognizing we need […]