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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
You Can Lead A Sales Person To Water, But You Can’t Make Him Think!
So much of the conversation we see in selling is on enabling the sales person (not just limited to the sales enablement function). Millions/Billions are invested in sales tools, training, content, and programs. We structure organizations “to optimize” performance, creating specialist roles so sales people don’t have to manage the whole process. We provide programs, scripts, systems/tools, to help the sales person in engaging prospects and customers. In some sense, it seems we are trying to handhold sales people through every conversation, every step of the process, every variation they may encounter. In spite of all these investments, sales performance […]
What We Do Is Not Complicated–Yet We Have A Tendency To Complicate It.
My friend, Andy Paul wrote a brilliant newsletter piece this weekend, entitled What We Do Is Not Complicated. His newsletter struck a chord. What we do isn’t complicated–yet somehow we tend to make it so–for ourselves, perhaps more importantly, for our customers. At it’s core, selling is simply about: Find a customer that has a problem they want to solve, that we are the best in the world at solving. Help the customer understand how to best solve their problem, achieving the outcomes they want, demonstrating the superior value you create with them. Assure they achieve the desired outcomes. Start […]
The Importance Of Setbacks
Too often, we get caught up in the rush of everyday life. The press of everyday activity, the constant intrusion and interruptions drive what we do. These become standard, we go on autopilot–even as a coping mechanism. Most important we stop paying attention, we stop being present. This doesn’t mean we aren’t accomplishing things. The most successful tend to build routines based on what works, and we repeat them over and over, until we become un-conscious (read not present) in our execution. It’s at these points be become most vulnerable, but we may be unconscious to the signals. Inevitably, things […]
Our Need To Sell Is Irrelevant To The Customer
As sales people, we are driven by our need to sell. Whether it’s the drive to win, attainment, commissions/earnings, or pressure from our managers, we have a high need to sell. Unfortunately, our need to sell is absolutely meaningless to customers. In fact, the more strongly we execute on that need, the more we alienate our customers. Regular readers know I’m prone to analogies. The analogy here is that our need to sell can be likened to pushing a rope uphill. The more we push, the less progress we make–ultimately, we have a tangled mess. But if someone’s at the […]
Freeing Up “Time To Sell” Is BS!
A friend forwarded me an article entitled, “Giving People More Time To Sell Is BS.” Intrigued, I clicked on the link. The article started with a statement to the effect of “ill informed pundits quoting data that sales people spend only 10-30% of their time F2F with customers.” I thought, “Hmm, that must be me…” I’ve used that data, but so have a lot of others. I call that TIme Available For Selling, (TAFS—just what we need, another acronym.) He went on discuss the selling distractions, arguing, “why would a sales person choose to spend their time on admin processes […]
Survey Fatigue And Customer Experience
Companies are obsessed (Hmmm, maybe not) with customer experience. Many seem to want to understand people’s customer experience–how or if they pay attention is anyone’s guess. Along with this obsession comes the obsession with measuring that customer experience. That along with technology making it easy to do surveys in real time, it seems as though almost every interaction is surveyed and measured. For example: “Thank you for buying our products, we’d like to understand your satisfaction by having you complete this customer satisfaction survey. If you complete it, you will be put in a drawing for a Starbucks card valued […]