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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
How Do They Make Money, Part 2
Recently I wrote, How Do They Make Money. It focused on understanding how our customers make money—deep understanding of their goals, strategies, markets, customers, plans, priorities to grow their business. In the article, I also talked about how we need to show the customer how we can help them make more money–by growing top line or bottom line or both. Let me extend this discussion further. Many organizations leverage channels, alliances, and various types of partnerships in their sales deployment strategies. These partners go by all sorts of names, VAR’s, Resellers, Distributors, Dealers, Integrators, Manufacturer’s Representatives, Agents, and so forth. They are […]
How Do They Make Money?
No, I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about your customers. At the core of everything we do as sales people, it’s about making money, that is producing revenue for our companies. We know how our companies make money, it’s through the revenues we create in selling the products and services. It’s also through our companies’ abilities to develop, produce, deliver and support those products/services profitably. Easy, we get that. But that’s not what drives our success as sales people. That’s not what creates our ability to engage our customers. They don’t care about how we make money–some seem to […]
Stop Wasting Your Time On Social Selling!
Recently, someone wrote me saying: “I have absolutely no idea how you have time to spend so long on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn, plus write articles for every site imaginable – and respond to all the comments…” This individual thought I was possibly wasting my time. I think it’s a fair question, many people wonder whether they should be investing in social channels, how much time to invest, whether there is a payoff. Social selling, social business, and the technologies underlying them are evolving so quickly that it’s very confusing. The amount of time and channels will vary for everyone, so there is no […]
Pipeline Games
I’m always amused by the games that go on as managers conduct pipeline and forecast reviews. Data shows sales people spend at least two hours a week on pipeline and forecast reviews. Think of it, 5% of the sales organization’s time in some of the most confusing and useless discussions I’ve seen. If we learned how to do these effectively, we could not only improve the quality of these reviews and information, as well as significantly reduce time spent in reviews. Here’s a scenario I run across too often: The first line sales manager sits down with the team collectively or […]
Deciding What To Buy Is Often The Easiest Part
As sales people, our focus is to convince the customer to buy our solution. We invest our time in understanding what they are trying to do, our competition, their decision-making process, and presenting a winning proposal. We try to align ourselves with their buying process, but focus on the part where they are deciding what to buy. Often, that’s the easiest part and the smallest part of their buying process. There’s actually so much more they have to go through. Most of it, if we don’t look for it, is invisible to us. Identifying the problem or opportunity, identifying and […]
Customers Lie, And They Are Stupid Too!
There are not many things that cause me to come unglued. But there are two that provoke immediate outrage—and usually a tirade if I’m speaking with an individual or a group. These two things are: Customers lie! The customer is stupid! These are, possibly, the most destructive statements and attitudes any business professional, but particularly sales people can have. Thinking this shapes our behaviors and approaches when we engage customers. However well we think we may disguise these attitudes, it always comes through, loud and clear, when we engage the customer. The reactions we get, as a result, we deserve! Customers […]