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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
When Do You Do Your Best Selling?
The lives of most sales people seem to be split between two types of frenzied activities—prospecting, trying to find someone willing to talk to you and chasing down deals. Often, our engagement models are reflections of this frenzy. We send 1000’s of emails, hoping enough people respond. For those that do, we’re in a rush to qualify–qualifying even the most marginal because our pipelines are empty. The deals that we do find are tough. Customers are much more educated and informed. They’ve done their homework, they know (or at least think they know) what they are looking for. We face […]
“If You Take Away Your Products, What’s Left?”
I read a wonderful quote from Colin Shaw, “If you take away a company’s products, what do you have left?*” It’s a critical question each sales and marketing professional needs to answer—ultimately, that’s your differentiation. That’s the value customers want that will cause you to stand out and win. Don’t get me wrong, your products and services are what get you in the game in the first place. So great products and services are mandatory. Increasingly, however, they are table stakes. In today’s world of complex B2B buying, by the time you’ve become shortlisted, any of the alternatives will solve […]
Leveraging Interruption!
Recently, I was reading a post on cold calling, it brought up the age old, “How do you generate leads without interrupting people?” The short answer is, “You can’t!” That is, unless prospects call you, in which case we are delighted they are interrupting us! The fact is, people choose to be interrupted–whether it’s a prospecting sales person, a colleague, a family member, any one. But we choose to be interrupted. We open the email, we pick up the phone, we respond to the knock on our office doors, we respond to the text. Interruptions fill our work and personal […]
Is Your Prospecting Call Relevant?
You’ve all experienced this, you download a white paper, maybe you sign up to evaluate a new SaaS tool. Within minutes, the phone rings, it’s an anxious SDR. “I see you are interested in our products, can I tell you more about them, or set up a meeting for you to learn more? “Can I set up a demo?” “When do you plan on buying, who will be involved in the decision making process?” Forget that you haven’t even gotten the white paper, or the logon link to the tool. These anxious sales people are already far down the road […]
1:1’s, Leveraging An Important Management Coaching Tool
The team at WideAngle and their CEO, Jon Birdsong hosted several of us in a fascinating discussion on One On Ones. Jon invited Shelley Gaynes of Gee Wiz Consulting, Rob Beattie of Thompson Reuters, and me for a fascinating discussion on what One On Ones are, how we are most effective in connecting with our people, how we leverage One On Ones to drive learning, development and performance. It was a hugely fun conversation and learned a huge amount. I was flattered and appreciate Jon and the WideAngle Team inviting me to participate. By the way, if you aren’t familiar with WideAngle, they […]
Your “Business Justified Solution” Is Insufficient To Win The Business!
I’ve been talking to a team of people about Value Propositions. They need to start providing business justification to their solutions–demonstrating their business value and differentiation. It’s exciting to see their excitement in doing this. Too few sales people understand how to do this, or take the time to present a business case for their solutions. Most of the time the customer is left to figure it out. You know what happens, the focus becomes more on price and less on business value. Being able to prevent business justified solutions is mandatory for every deal, those that don’t do this […]