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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
Why Do They NEED What You Are Selling?
I have to admit, part of the reason I’m writing this post is to ease my conscience (Yes, I do have one). Yesterday, I was doing a deal review. It was a very exciting opportunity and a very large deal–one of the largest this sales person would have for the year. Fortunately, he was very early in the sales cycle. He had done a pretty good job at qualifying the customer. It was a real deal for a significant amount of money. As he described it, he focused on the technology of the solution (he sold technology products/solutions). He had […]
Questions We Are Afraid To Ask
Often, in talking about deals with sales people, there are things that just don’t make sense. The customer is doing things that don’t make sense–they are very far off our normal experience in similar sales situations. They may be responding in a very unusual manner. They may be asking things that are really wrong–perhaps missing critical issues they should be looking at, demonstrating real misunderstanding of the issues they should be considering for a solution, or focusing on the wrong issues. Sometimes, perhaps in the very worst cases, if we were in their shoes, we would not be considering some […]
Sales People Are Not Automatons!
Recently, I was doing pipeline, deal, and territory reviews with several sales teams. In the reviews, they were clearly struggling–they had new sales processes, new tools to help them in executing their deal strategies, developing their accounts, and managing their pipelines. All had been put in place to help improve their effectiveness and performance. But they were struggling, performance wasn’t improving, they were spending a lot more time on the tools/processes than they were in actually engaging and executing with customers. As we progressed in the reviews, it became clear they were getting caught up in the “form” of the […]
You Can’t Get What You Want By Focusing On What YOU Want
Bear with me on my word play in the title. I was just doing some deal reviews with a very frustrated sales person. He had a deal that was very important to him. He’d been working it for a long time, he needed it to make his numbers, he was in the closing stage of the process. Apparently, he was winning the deal, but he couldn’t get the PO. He told me, “They’ve told me I’ve won and I should get the PO any day now. But that was weeks ago, I keep calling them asking, ‘Where’s the PO?’ They […]
Selling In A “Knowledge Based” Economy
The days of product, even solution based differentiation are long passed. We can no longer count on great products to provide sustained differentiation and competitive advantage. Don’t get me wrong, great products and solutions are the foundation of our businesses and the value we create for customers. They are the things our customers buy and implement to achieve their own strategic growth goals. So they are critical to thriving economies and company growth. But as we look at our customers’ buying processes, great products and solutions are table stakes to getting considered. Ultimately, the differentiator is the knowledge and experience […]
Design Your Customer Experience To Lose The Right Customers!
I received an interesting email. A person had read a post I had written about Customer Experience. As a result, he was motivated to sign up for my newsletter. There the difficulties began. Apparently the “widget” I use doesn’t allow for keyboard short-cuts. That was a problem with this individual’s customer experience of my site. It didn’t stop there, apparently there is the same problem with the confirmation email, which further annoyed this individual. He implied there are other things about the process that annoyed him–but the only other thing he would receive is a thank you email. So, I’m not […]