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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
Do We Set Our People Up For Failure?
I’m pretty tough on sales people. You’ve read my endless rants about bad prospecting, clueless call execution, and other examples of poor “salesmanship.” One thing, I’m certain of, is that I will never run out of examples of really bad selling. But when you reflect, you have to consider the question, “Are so many sales people really that bad?” Or is there another reason they are failing? Now before you think I’ve gone all soft on you, there are plenty of really bad sales people–people who don’t deserve to be sales people. These are those that lie, manipulate, and do anything […]
“No Decision Made,” Are You The Problem?
Depending on the research, No Decision Made (NDM) represents a huge percent of the deals we “lose.” CSO Insights puts it at over 40% of forecast deals. CEB put it at over 60% of pipeline deals. Whatever way you look at it, it represents huge lost opportunity and wasted efforts on our part. Too often, we shrug our shoulders, “It’s the customers, they just can’t get themselves organized to buy.” “They just couldn’t sell management on the business case.” We tend to look at this, thinking it’s out of our control. Reflect on your own deals in the past 12 months. […]
Can You Change Your Customer? Can You Change Yourself?
Once we eliminate all the fancy words and hand waving, sales is about getting our customers to change. We try to get them to switch suppliers/vendors. We try to get them to change their current operations and procedures, improving the results they produce. We try to get them to take advantage of opportunities they are missing, helping them grow and compete. We try to get them to overcome the inertia of the everyday, getting them to do something different. Whatever we sell, what we really are selling is change. Sometimes the customer starts the ball rolling, coming to us, “We need […]
Bits And Pieces, March 12, 2016
I’ve decided to start a new feature on the blog called Bits And Pieces. I’ll publish it on Friday evening’s or Saturday morning–hopefully weekly. The purpose of these posts is to provide brief ideas, perspectives, things I’m thinking about, or announcements of things I’m involved in. I’d love your perspective on how to make this more useful. Books: I just completed the most important book I’ve read in a long time. Mindset by Carol Dweck is fantastic, particularly learning how we can move from fixed to growth oriented mindsets. It’s probably the single most impactful book you can read. What […]
Business People Who Sell
Our customers don’t need sales people calling on them. They don’t need a person that can only focus on talking about their products and services–after all customers have the web to learn about products. They don’t need someone that can engage in a scripted conversation, listening for key words, so they can set up a demo or pass them onto someone who will be talking about their products. Our customers work in businesses. Each business, each customer within those businesses face different challenges and have different opportunities. Their focus is on doing their jobs, on achieving their goals, on being successful. […]
Making The Numbers!
Every sales professional is obsessed with making the numbers. Meet another sales person and there’s that secret language we use in speaking to each other. Where’re you at? How are you doing? What’s your year looking like? To non sales people, these are different, perhaps slightly philosophical questions. But to every sales person, it’s about the number, quota, or our attainment against monthly, quarterly, annual objectives. In our quest to “make the numbers,” we often miss an entirely different set of numbers that need to be made. If these numbers aren’t achieved, it’s unlikely we’ll ever make our numbers. It’s the […]