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
What We Get Wrong About Account Based Selling
Account based marketing and selling gets a lot of attention–it should. There’s huge amounts of data about the cost of acquisition–the cost of growing revenue from existing customers versus the costs of acquiring new customers. Before I go further, let me be clear, we have to drive both, if we are to grow over the long term, we need to be acquiring new customers and expanding our share within current customers. But the focus of this article is on our current customers and how we grow the business. But what do we get wrong about growing our accounts? We abandon […]
What’s Next?
A critical question for every sales professional is the question of “What’s next,” particularly as we look at the deals we seek to move forward. Too often, doing deal reviews, sales people share what’s happened, but struggle with the question of “what’s next?” They know they are trying to win a deal, too often, they respond, “Well, I’ve got to get an order.” But when probed, “What are the next things that have to happen to get the order?” The majority of sales people that can answer the question, generally respond, “We have to do a discovery call, we have […]
Automation–Creating Higher Impact Interactions
There’s a lot of discussion, most of it pretty misguided, about the potential impact of automation and AI on sales and buying. Most of the discussions are about customers preferring to buy through electronic channels and moving away from the need for sales people. There will be huge movements to that mode of buying with certain types of buying. Personally, for example, if I can get something through Amazon or other web store, I prefer that. Less out of avoidance of sales people, more out of convenience. But too much of the discussion of the future of selling–particularly complex B2B […]
Make Versus Buy
Recently, I’ve been involved in some conversations with some very smart people. The discussions have been addressing the need for sales people to empathize with customers’ feeling some level of shame or guilt in getting buying a product, since it is a recognition of their inability to solve the problem on their own. Frankly, I don’t get the point. The more I explore it, the less I get it. In fairness to the smart people driving the discussion, I probably don’t understand what they are saying. Perhaps, I’m guilty of wordsmithing, or perhaps I’m looking at the other side of […]
The Tragedy Of “No Decision Made”
Depending on the research you read and believe, the number of buying journeys ending in “No Decision Made,” is around 50-60%. Think about what that means. Sure, we’re disappointed–it’s a lost opportunity for us. We may have invested a lot of time, resource, and energy in competing to win the decision from the customer buying team. But the real tragedy is the lost opportunity for the customer. The tragedy of “No Decision Made,” is the customer has failed to achieve their goal. They have failed to solve their problem. They are missing opportunities they sought to attack. Think about what […]
When The Customer Doesn’t Respond The Way You Want Them To
This afternoon, the phone rang, I picked it up, “Hi, this is Dave Brock.” Clearly, there was a sales person on the line, she said, “May I please speak to Dave?” (You can see this call going south already.) When I responded it was me, without taking a breath, she launched into a 97 second pitch. I tried to interrupt, but she wouldn’t have any of that. At the end of the pitch, again without taking a breath, she asked, “Can I schedule a meeting and demo?” My response was, “No.” Without, a pause, she went for her alternate close. […]