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
“Focus On Activity More Than Results”
It’s clear that activity drives results—or at least it should. We all know that orders and revenue is a trailing metric. The danger of focusing on end results is that by the time you can report them, it’s too late to do anything about it. If you focus only on making the number, at the end of the month, quarter, year, you’ve missed it, there are no do overs. You can only look to recovering in future periods–but then it’s too late, you’ve missed your goal. As a result, we want to find the leading indicators/activities that produce the results […]
Great Prospecting
I use this column, too often, to whine about the state of prospecting emails. But every once in a while, I get a great prospecting note. Despite the dozens of bad emails I get and delete without getting past the first line, there are some that capture my attention and stand out. There are some that earn/demand a response because of the quality of the effort. Recently I received just such an email: Subject: I’d like to guest write on Partners In EXCELLENCE Hey there Dave! My name is Diego Segura, I’m a 17 year old brand identity designer and […]
The Single Most Important Thing To Drive Sales
I read dozens of articles outlining the single thing sales people or managers need to do to drive sales success. It’s Constantly prospect Constantly be developing referrals Focus on target customers/ICP Viciously qualify Understand your customers’ businesses and problems Develop strong relationships Engage with insight Facilitate their buying process Create value in every interaction Leverage a disciplined sales process Develop business justified proposals Closing is all that matters Generate net new logos/customers Retain and build share with customers and key accounts Leverage social channels Plan and execute high impact calls Implement a Land and Expand strategy Coordinate/integrate with marketing ……. […]
Ending Sales Heroics
Get any group of sales people together and we start exchanging war stories. Usually, they involve how we saved a deal, usually it’s at the last moment, usually it’s a huge noteworthy deal, and too often it involves a pricing action (“We sweetened the deal for them….”) Listen to any sales kick-off speaker and, usually, there are a few stories about their own sales heroics—the big deals they won that got them to this stage. I have to admit, it’s a lot of fun to exchange these stories, there’s always the friendly competition of “one-upping” each other. In the moment, […]
We Need To Stop Making Things Easy!
We seem to be, individually and organizationally, fixated on making things Easy. To be honest, the job of selling complex B2B solutions isn’t and shouldn’t be viewed as easy. Customers buying B2B solutions are not confronting an easy task (otherwise, we wouldn’t have 63% ending in no decision made). In are quest for easiness, we are cultivating a mindset in our organizations that does not match the reality of our buyer’s worlds. We are spoon feeding everything to our people, setting expectations that things should be easy. Too many wait for demand to be generated….. They won’t prospect because it’s […]
“Customers Won’t Buy Until They Are Ready To Buy”
Recently, I had a discussion with someone, actually a polite disagreement. I was advocating, “Disrupting customers’ thinking, getting them to recognize new opportunities, inciting them to change and buy.” This thoughtful individual, was upset with my position. Among other things, he made the statement, “Customers won’t buy until they are ready to buy. We have to wait for them, then be prepared to work with them in their buying process.” He’s absolutely right, customers will never buy until they are ready to buy. But his statement made me think of the old Maytag Repairman commercials. They were bored on their […]