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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
The Brave New World Of Buying Automation
There was a hilarious article in the New York Times, A Robot That Has Fun At Telemarketing’s Expense. It got me to thinking about the future of buying and selling. The sales and marketing automation markets are among the hottest SaaS markets around. Each year, 1000’s of new suppliers of software solutions emerge. Collectively the markets are expected to generate 10’s of billions of revenues. All of this supposedly oriented at making sales and marketers more efficient and effective. We are drowning in the output of these tools. We are drowning in emails, most of which are irrelevant. While the […]
Why The “Why” Is Important
As sales people, we know the “why” is very important in probing our customers. “Why do they feel this way? Why do you do things this way? Why is this is a problem? Why wouldn’t they change? Why are they interested/not interested?” The “why” is important to your people and your own performance in the job. People wonder “Why?” Why do we have to use the sales process? Why do we have to be data entry clerks using CRM? Why is my quota set the way it is? Why is it so tough to get approvals to do something? Why […]
It’s Really Not About The Buying Process
As sales professionals (marketing too), for years we’ve always been pretty self centered. We’ve focused on what we want–selling something. We, me included, talk a lot about the selling process. In recent years, we’ve discovered that’s really unfashionable. We have to mask our true goal and be customer focused. So we’ve shifted our terminology to focus on the customer buying process. In politically correct circles, we talk about the buying process and engaging the customer in their buying process, perhaps even being prescriptive in their buying process. The intensity of focus and discussion has even made it THE CUSTOMER BUYING […]
It’s Not “Integrated Sales And Marketing,” It’s “Interleaved Sales And Marketing”
I’ve been pretty tough on content marketers and marketing in a couple of my recent posts, “Are They At 57% Yet,” and “Opportunities We Are Blind To.” Beyond that, there are hundreds of articles and discussions on Integrated Sales And Marketing. The discussions are powerful, the walls we erect between the functions, the fingers we point at each other are diminishing, albeit slowly. We are realizing we have shared goals and must work together to optimize our abilities to attract, communicate, engage, and connect with our customers. There have been dramatic shifts in the type and relevance of content we create. All […]
Should We Be Rethinking The Role Of SDR’s?
Recently, I’ve been on a bit of a rampage, rethinking how we identify and pursue opportunities. It started in “Are They At 57% Yet,” and continued with “Opportunities We Are Blind To.” In this post, I’m continuing on the same theme, but trying to look at how we deploy people to actually find these opportunities. I’m a terrific fan of the concept of SDR’s. It’s critical to build specialized skill to have high impact first engagements with customers. In most organizations, prospecting and finding enough opportunities is a critical problem, so applying specialized skills at the very front end of […]
You Can’t Go It Alone On Complex Deals!
You have a huge deal, it’s the biggest one you’ve ever had, it’s huge for your company. You and your company may not have done many of these types of deals before. Or the complexity of the deal will require you to do some special things (no I’m not talking about pricing). Inevitably, it’s complex, there are lots of twist and turns about the deal. You struggle to understand the buying team and engage with them. There’s tough competition. Whatever the situation, it’s not a slam dunk. It’s not a standard situation where you can pitch your product, create a […]