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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
Why I Won’t Invest Time In You!
I get deluged with emails and calls asking me for a short phone conversation. Here’s how one stated today: Hi there – Just read your post. [Body of pitch selling me something.] More details below. Hope to hear back from you soon. Thanks, [Name deleted to spare this person the shame of being called out for cluelessness] I was actually mildly interested in what this guy was offering, but then decided to ignore the email. As I reflected on the note, he hadn’t taken the time to address the note to me personally. Clearly, he’s targeting bloggers, mentioning interests in […]
Making B2B More Like B2C Sales???
I read a terrific article by Tiffani Bova, “6 Tips For Selling In The Age Of The Connected Consumer.” There’s a lot I agree with, but one point stood out, Make B2B More Like B2C. I don’t disagree, in fact, there are huge amounts we can learn from B2C, particularly in the areas of personalization, customer experience, and ease of doing business. We also see many of the trends in B2C leading B2B. For example, B2C customers have leveraged digital channels in far more powerful ways than in B2B, but B2B is slowly emulating many of the practices (just read […]
“The Best Way To Sell Something……..”
Recently, I read a quote, “The best way to sell something, don’t sell anything. Earn the awareness, respect, and trust of those who might buy.” I suppose I get the idea, but somehow I think there is much more to selling, and our customers deserve more from us. Awareness, respect, trust are critical, but they are insufficient to drive customers to change or to buy. I understand what the person is trying to say. He’s suggests avoiding all the typical bad behaviors we see from sales people—always pitching, focused on their own goals rather than customer goals, leveraging manipulative behaviors […]
Selling Would Be So Easy If It Weren’t For Those Damn Customers!
For some weeks, I’ve been on the war path about emerging trends in sales. We see the same issues and trends in too many blog posts/books, at every conference, and in the social channels. The focus in much of our discussions on selling is about us–sales people. We see discussions focused on increasing specialization in sales–actually adaptations of the Toyota Production System. We have highly focused roles, each role focuses on it’s job in the sales process, once complete, the widget–I mean customer, is passed to the next function, then the next, then the next…..on down the sales assembly line. […]
Yeah, You’re Making Quota, Are You Doing Your Job?
Sales is responsible for executing the company strategy in the face of the customer. What’s this really mean? Let’s imagine you have two sales people, each with goals of $5M. The company they work for has two core product lines, each strategic to achieving their growth plan. Sales person A makes his numbers—but only selling his favorite product line , “C.” That’s where he has the most confidence, plus he can always make his goals focusing on product line C. Sales person B, also, makes her numbers, but her performance is balanced across product lines “C” and a newer, slightly […]
Sales People Don’t Message, They Have Conversations
I’ve spent the past couple of days at the TOPO Summit. It’s become one of 3 “must attend” conferences I go to every year. All the presenters are rock solid practitioners, with pragmatic advice. However, as I listened to many of the presenters and much of the conversation, there was one theme that disturbed me. People were constantly talking about how sales people should “message” more effectively. Perhaps, I’m guilty of wordsmithing, but sales people don’t message. They engage people in conversations. Marketing “messages,” as they should. The communications marketing provides is primarily one way, creating awareness, provoking interest, educating […]