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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
Are Sales People Afraid Cold Calling Will Die?
My apologies, up front, I have been trying to resist plunging into yet another discussion about cold calling. The proponents of cold calling (I’m one) and the opponents of cold calling are about as likely to reach agreement as the Democrats and Republicans in Congress are. We each tend to be staunch in our positions, showing zero flexibility in looking at another alternative. I had committed to extricate myself from these discussions, because they don’t seem to accomplish much. But here we go—-again. What provoked me is a very thoughtful article by Daniel Disney on LinkedIn: Are Sales People Afraid […]
Is “Figuring Things Out” A Critical Sales Skill?
It seems much of the trend in sales is to provide our sales people all the answers they need to cover every situation. We provide sales automation tools that instruct the sales person exactly who to call and what companies. We script the conversations, providing questions that get the answers we want. We provide playbooks, we provide endless amounts of content, new programs, ready to send emails. All the sales person has to do is follow the playbook, stick to the script, blindly make the next call on the list. We focus and instrument everything a sales person should do, […]
Responsibility And Character
Every once in a while, I’m driven to write about something outside sales and business. Today, I’m driven to comment on things that I’ve seen in the news over the past couple of weeks, months. Unfortunately, sometimes it takes tragic events to wake us up, to help us remember who we are as human beings and contributors in building our society. We are all shocked by yet another school shooting in Parkland, Florida. We wonder, “How many more will it take until we take action to change?” Our elected officials point fingers and make excuses, yet it is the actions […]
If Prospecting Is The Toughest Part Of Selling, Why Do We Put Our Least Experienced People In Those Roles?
Many people believe prospecting is the toughest part of selling. I’m actually not sure I believe that, but I do believe prospecting is tough. Our customers overwhelmed with just doing their jobs. Add on top of that, the fact they are constantly deluged with messaging from innumerable companies competing for attention and their budgets. Getting through all these barriers, engaging customers who may not want to be engaged, who may not be interested or care is a huge challenge. Finding customers that may be interested and want to engage isn’t easy. Too many sales people don’t want to prospect, it’s […]
“….Must Have Previous SaaS Sales Experience”
I was speaking to a colleague the other day, he was looking for a job. He was a very successful salesperson, unhappy in his current role. He commented, “What’s all of this stuff about ‘SaaS?’ All the jobs require SaaS sales experience.” It is puzzling how “SaaS” or “XaaS” seems to have a disproportionate mindshare in the sales world these days. When you look at the economy, it’s a small part of the economy, by extension, represents a small part of selling jobs. But so much of what we read focuses on SaaS. But SaaS means a lot of different […]
Who Are We Designing Our Marketing/Sales Strategies To Serve?
Every day, we are pummeled with experts talking about how to make sales people more efficient. The most fashionable ideas seem to be around extreme specialization/mechanization of selling. These pundits often cite applying manufacturing principles to designing our sales engagement strategies. Some cite the grandfather of lean/agile manufacturing principles, the Toyota Production System (TPS). At the same time we are pummeled with increasingly specialized tools to help free up time to sell. Sales and marketing stacks are growing, I’ve seen one Fortune 50 company “bragging” about their sales stack of 19 tools. All these things are supposed to make us […]