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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
Are You Aligned With Where Your Customer Is In Their Buying Process?
A friend called me for advice today. He’s a great sales person, a big deal hunter. He wanted to review a deal strategy and call plan he was making on a CTO at a very large, fast growing prospect. His colleagues had been working with the CTO’s team. By far, they were the front runners for their first piece of business with this customer. By itself, it was a big order, but his colleagues saw a lot more potential in the account. That’s why they got my friend, let’s call him “John,” involved. Reviewing the account, their growth, their requirements, […]
Provocation Or Obnoxiousness?
The concept of provoking our customers, getting them to think about their businesses differently is a key element of providing insights. Paraphrasing Brent Adamson, to help our customers “unlearn” we have to show them what they are currently doing may be wrong. That is, there may be different ways of operating that will produce superior results, or there may be opportunities they are missing. It’s a powerful concept. But it’s one that requires deep knowledge about the customer, their operations, their markets/customers, and their competition. It’s not something that can be pulled off without having a strong basis of credibility and […]
“Are You The Decisionmaker?”
I was reading a sales blog post on critical questions to ask the customer. One that jumped out to me was the advice to make sure you ask, “Are you the decisionmaker?” Perhaps I’m being too nit-picky, but it seems to be a terrible question. As I reread it, I thought, what do we learn from the response to the question? First the response can only be “Yes,” or “No.” (I thought it was conventional wisdom that open ended questions tend to elicit more information than closed ended questions.) We really learn very little from the response to this question, […]
Closing The Sale
Earlier today, I was interviewed for an article on “Closing The Sale.” The article is in a publication focused on small business owners. As we concluded the conversation, the interviewer said, “Your answers were completely different than I expected.” I think too many of us–entrepreneurs and sales people, alike, have mistaken impressions of closing the sale. As a result, we close far fewer deals than we might. Leveraging (and paraphrasing) Adriana’s questions, I thought I’d refresh your thinking about closing the sale. What are the key components that lead up to closing any sale? Implicitly, this question focuses on the final […]
Understanding Power And Influence
One of the core issues in understanding and influencing our customers’ buying processes is to make sure we are working with the right people, doing the right things at the right time. Traditional wisdom says, “Work with the decision-maker!” Sometimes that manifested itself with further wisdom, “Call at the top.” The thinking being reaching high up the food chain, getting the right C-Level executive who will make the decision for us, stuffing it down on the organization. In reality it seldom works that way. Smart executives know that stuffing something into the organization is a sure route to failure. They […]
What Have You Done Lately?
Sales is the only job where the scorecard on performance is reset at the beginning of every month, quarter, year. In so many other roles, what you have been doing rolls over to what you continue to do, or what you need to be doing in the future. But Sales is different. Regardless how well you performed last month, on the first of each month, everybody is reset to zero. The top performers, mid-range performers, poor performers all have the same scorecard, they start in the same place with $0 and a goal to make for the month. We may, […]