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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
Understanding Transactional Buying
There are 1000’s of articles about transactional selling. The collective wisdom of most of those posts can be summarized as follows: “Transactional selling sucks!” It does! To expand on what most of these say, it not only sucks, the only way you can win is on price, and “real sellers” want to avoid it at all costs. Others say that it is all going the way of the web and e-procurement, so there is really no “selling opportunity.” But the focus on transactional selling has blinded us to transactional buying and the real value we can create for those customers […]
Your Current Sales Training Is Just Table Stakes!
As a sales professional, hopefully, you are upgrading your skills, not only learning but executing what you have learned from your sales training. Hopefully, you’ve had recent exposure to some of the really great consultative, solution, insight, Challenger training programs. Mastery of these skills is important in today’s and tomorrow’s worlds of selling. Without these skills, at least in complex B2B selling, you will simply be outsold by those who are effectively leveraging these skills in competing against you. If you aren’t leveraging these skills in every aspect of your job, you will simply be irrelevant to the customer. You […]
Powerful LinkedIn Networking!
I received a LinkedIn email from an individual, apparently one of my LinkedIn connections. This person presents himself as a LinkedIn Guru, selling his services to help people master and leverage LinkedIn to the best advantage. So in receiving this email, I expected to see a master at work, hoping to learn from it. The email is in it’s entirety except the final signature block. I’ve inserted a few comments in [brackets.] Dear Cherished 1st Degree Connections. [I’m not sure how cherished I feel when I look at his distribution list. I’m also not sure how happy I am to have […]
Being Right Doesn’t Count, Engaging The Customer Does!
Within 30 minutes this morning, two things happened. First, a good friend called ranting and raving about a prospecting call that went wrong. Then I saw Todd Schnick’s brilliant post on the same issue. Let me backtrack a little. My friend called, very upset about a prospecting call yesterday. It was an important prospect, he’d managed to get agreement from the VP of Sales for a conversation, so he called. A few things happened initially, that put the call on a bad track. Something had come up with the VP and it wasn’t the most convenient time, but my friend […]
It’s Too Late If You Only Help Your Customer Solve Problems!
A lot of what we have always done as great sales people is to help our customers solve problems. But that can’t be what drives us in our jobs any longer. If we focus on helping our customers solve problems, we’ve missed a huge part of our value creation. If we focus on helping our customers solve problems, we become part of the 57% fodder, which is just this decade’s version of RFP fodder. What we really need to be doing is Creating Problems For Our Customers! Oh, this could go so wrong if you stop reading here. Let me […]
Prospecting Is The New “Prospecting”
I’ve been involved in a number of discussions on prospecting recently. One sales exec complaining to me when I suggested he and his people needed to be prospecting. His response was, “Marketing has the responsibility for generating and giving us high quality leads.” When I asked, “Are you getting enough to make your numbers,” from the look on his face, I knew he wasn’t, but I also knew he wouldn’t listen to me–he was firmly entrenched in his position. (Needless to say, I didn’t get that project, but suspect I will in a few months with his successor, the CEO […]