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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 Our Customers’ Businesses Better Than They Do?
I’ve always sought to understand my prospects’ and my customers’ business better than they do. I study target market sectors, understanding the dynamics in the markets, key issues the players face, key trends, potential opportunities, threats. I look at financial performance, key operational issues, disruptive strategies and so forth. When I target a prospect, I do a deep dive into learning as much about them as I can. If they are public, I analyze their financial and operational performance. I compare that performance to their competitors. I look at everything I can trying to learn as much as I could. […]
Objecting To Objections
Lately, I’ve been watching some eLearning programs on objection handling. It suddenly struck me, there’s a unique arrogance we sellers have about the concepts of objections. Too often, the underlying thinking seems to be that salespeople are the only people that encounter objections. That objections are something unique that customers inflict on us. We develop techniques to “handle” objections. Some “experts” promote techniques that seem somewhat manipulative. We seem to have a mindset that too many conversations with prospects and customers are “adversarial” relationships we must prepare for and “handle.” We’re obsessed with techniques and answers to objections. I Googled […]
Should We Be That Surprised By The Digital Buying Journey?
The “big news” in customer engagement is the customer digital buying journey. The shift to customers preferring the digital channels over dealing with sales people. Let’s be clear, a rep-free buying process, a preference for “self service,” is nothing new. Buyers have been doing this for decades, if not longer. It’s probably the dominant form of selling in consumer products. In consumer products, we know it is a low touch selling environment. We spend a lot of time in analyzing buying trends, merchandising. We advertise, promote, we package products so they visually “leap off the shelves.” Most of consumer purchases […]
Why Are We Satisfied With Such Poor Win Rates?
We struggle to hit our goals, make our numbers. Every year, we see decreases in % of sales people making their goals. At the same time, our solution to try to make our numbers is driving increases in volumes and velocity. As I start peeling back the numbers, reinforced by data from the research firms, I start seeing win rates at 20% or less! We’re winning fewer than 5 deals we qualify! When I challenge leaders about this, too often, they either: Don’t realize this is the actual performance; or shrug their shoulders, “It is what it is….,” alternatively, “We […]
What Sellers Can Learn From F1 Racing
I’m a huge fan of F1 Racing. It’s just fascinating to watch, learn about the teams, drivers, cars. I love looking at the racing strategies. In the early 2000’s I was fortunate in beginning to see a little of the behind the scenes work of the F1 teams. I was on the founding team of an AI software tool. It turned out, after each race, the teams had terabytes of data they wanted to analyze to improve how they performed in the next race. Our product provided them the capability to get performance insights they never could have gotten before. […]
“As Luck Would Have It…..”
I’ll start with a golf story. For years, I’ve tried to play golf. I’ve gone through lessons, I’ve spent $hundreds on getting the right equipment, and thousands on greens fees. And I suck! Somehow, I forget to do what I know I should be doing. Somehow I just get so focused, not purposefully doing the wrong things, but falling into it, just because it’s easy to do. I’ve learned my “handicap,” is me. But what keeps me going? At least once a round, I get lucky. In spite of how good or bad my swing was, or even though I […]