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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
How Does Your Customer Make Money?
Recently, I was in a discussion with a group of sales people. I posed the question, “How does your customer make money?” Most of them responded with what their customers did, for example: “They’re a SaaS company, they manufacture products for this market, they are a services provider……” They knew some basics about the customers, their products, and so forth, but they struggled to get to any detail about how their customers made money. I asked them, “What is your customer’s business model,” which is a more obscure way of asking how they make money. Most of the people in […]
Hunters And Farmers…….Again
There’s a round of discussions going on about Hunters and Farmers. Underlying these discussions are attitudes, “Real sales people eat fresh meat every day” (The hunter camp), “We need to develop our accounts to maximize LCV” (Farmers). I even saw a post on, “Which is better, a farmer who generates $1M of incremental business, or a hunter who generates $1M of new business?” It’s as if $M from one is better than $1M from the other—they miss the point that each is developing $1M of incremental revenue! That’s what sales people are supposed to do, they are supposed to develop […]
“Selling Is Helping,” What A Load Of Crap!
Mike Kunkle has posed an interesting question about the trend to describe “Selling Is Helping,” on LinkedIn. You really need to read the discussion. I get hugely bored with much of the discussion about selling is helping. The concept is fine–with some revisions, but the main challenge in this concept is in execution. So I get everything off my chest, this movement is parallel to the movement to not call sales people “sales people.” There are dozens to hundreds of titles people use to distance their sales people from the “stigma” of being in sales. Pile onto this the companies […]
Should You Mandate One On One’s?
Jon Birdsong, CEO of WideAngle raised a fascinating question in a post: Should You Mandate One On One Meetings? My immediate reaction is if the manager and sales person are conducting these meetings correctly, the value of the meetings becomes so great that mandating them is a moot point. Each looks forward to the meeting because each is learning and growing. The meetings are helpful to both in growing and achieving their goals. As a result, the meetings become a valuable use of each person’s time. They can’t imagine not having them. Unfortunately, too often this isn’t the case. Both […]
Killing The Conversation
Over the past couple of days, I’ve participated–at a distance–in an interesting conversation. Let me clarify, the conversation was interesting, but the dynamic of the conversation and what destroyed it was more interesting. To provide some background, the conversation was on LinkedIn, I had gotten involved because it was about an article I had written that a friend had shared. It stimulated a lot of comments–both pro and con. I could have easily imagined the conversation being a voice to voice, or face to face conversation. What was fascinating was to watch the “visual dynamic” of the conversation. Without even […]
Future Of Selling, Glass Half Full Or Half Empty?
There seem to be a couple of prevailing schools of thought promoted by self proclaimed experts on the Future of Selling. An increasingly dominant one has a very negative view of selling (ironically, promoted by many who sell their products/services to the sales function). While I may be overstating it, their view is the majority of sales people are mediocre to outright bad. It seems to have the premise, “we can’t expect substantive improvement in sales people performance, so let’s focus on the tools and techniques those mediocre sales people can use to drive revenue.” In this world, the strategy […]