Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
“Dear Occupant Or Current Resident….” More Horrible Prospecting
I’ve decided to write a periodic series about bad prospecting letters. Every week, I receive dozens of just horrible letters. Fortunately, Outlook does a pretty good job a sending them to SPAM, so I don’t have to deal with the “I’m following up with the terrible prospecting letter I sent last week with another terrible letter.” They are from sales people who are just executing poorly. Maybe they haven’t been trained, they are getting bad templates or materials. Even though they are bad letters, there are too many to single out. An in some sense, it may not be fair. […]
Finding Time For The Decisionmakers
I wrote, Finding The Decisionmaker, discussing the consensus buying process and the increasing number of decisionmakers involved in complex B2B sales ( Average of 5.4 according to CEB.) My good friend, Martin Schmalenbach, always calls BS on me in such interesting ways. Martin posed the issue, “Think of the poor sales person reading this. They are already overwhelmed with deals/opportunities and managing what they have going on. Now you are asking them to call on 2-3 times more people. How are they going to do it? How are they going to research, prepare and manage their time with the increase […]
Finding The Decisionmaker
We want to focus our sales strategies on the Decision-maker. Some have referred to that person as “VITO,” the Very Important Top Officer. Sales trainers tell us to call high, in the quest for finding the decision-maker. We talk about gate keepers, influencers, recommenders, technical buyers, financial buyers, and any other label we can find. Finding the decision-maker is tough! Part of the problem, in complex B2B sales, there is seldom a decision-maker. According to CEB, there are 5.4 decision-makers involved in today’s consensus sale. Even then, they have a very difficult time coming to agreement. CSO Insights reports only 45.9% […]
“I Have To Speak To You In Bullet Points…….”
Understanding our customers’ behavioral styles is critical to our effectiveness in connecting with and communicating to them. There are a number of tools that help us understand the behavioral style of our customers (and colleagues). They go by the names of DISC, Meyers Briggs, and others. Each of us has a behavioral style—our styles are neither good nor bad, they just tell us how we tend to hear and engage, how we process information, what influences our abilities to make decisions. If we want to connect effectively and impactfully , it’s critical for us to understand the behavioral styles of […]
Why, How, Who, When, And What
There’s a huge difference between what our customers go through to buy and what most sales people do in trying to sell those customers. It’s this difference that causes much of the disconnect between customers and sales people. It’s recognizing this difference and engaging customers in their entire buying process that separates great sales people from everyone else. Loosely, I characterize the buying process as Why, How, Who, When, and What. I’ll pause for a moment, you’ll have to give me a little literary license as I describe this. I know I’ll get comments saying is should be another variant […]
Dreamforce By The Numbers
Dreamforce is an incredible event. In addition to being probably the largest conference focused on sales and marketing, it has a tremendous impact on San Francisco and on SalesForce.com Charities! Take a look at Dreamforce 2014 by the numbers. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)