Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Getting The Digital Buying Journey Wrong
I visited the website of a very large enterprise software provider. I found myself at this website to help me better understand some of the issues my client faced. I wanted to learn more about the issues and the things my client should be considering before they even considered looking toward solutions. While this software provider is a major provider of solutions to the challenges I believed my client had, I wasn’t yet ready to look at the solutions. I wanted to help my client think about the problems and issues first. They needed to define those and what they […]
It’s Account Planning Season
Now that SKO season has passed, we’ve got our annual quotas, we’ve started rebuilding our pipelines after depleting them at year end, we’re into account planning season. It’s time to pull out those powerpoints you updated a year ago, blow the digital dust off them, and update them. We plug in the new numbers—the account financial performance in the past year, our quotas/goals for the account. We may update the plan with key accomplishments from last year, new org charts, and a few initiatives we plan for next year. We present the plans, management nods their heads in the right […]
The New Sales Process
Most of our “sales processes” are failing us. There are a couple of core reasons we’ve found. First, sales people don’t pay attention to them or execute them poorly. This post isn’t for those people. Second, we have outdated views of the sales process. We design it to be a relatively linear progression of activities we undertake with the customer. Despite knowing the customer buying process is very squishy and wandering, we design our processes to be relatively rigid, rigid to the point of being highly scripted. Overlay on this, the focus is on our activities and the activities we […]
“Do You See Challenges We Aren’t Managing Well?”
I agreed to speak with the sales person. Responding to his email, I asked, “Do you see challenges that we aren’t addressing well? Why do you think we are a good prospect for your solutions? I didn’t think it was an unreasonable question. The sales person had reached out suggesting he could help us grow and improve in ways we hadn’t experienced. At our meeting, the salesperson responded to my queries (He was selling a sales/marketing tool). “Our solution interfaces with virtually every CRM, We automatically capture most activity, feeding that to CRM and other systems. We leverage AI technologies […]
Partnering And Selling
I cringe every time I get an email or social media invitation, “Dave, we’d like to partner with you…..” It’s always code for, “I want to sell you something!” Alternatively, “Can I get you to do something form me?” But it’s become prevalent. I wonder why sellers are so embarrassed about what they do and their goals, that they can’t be direct with the people they are trying to reach. We should be proud of being sellers, at the same time we have to recognize that we only achieve our goal of selling, through helping the customer achieve the goals […]
The Answer To Every Selling Challenge Can’t Be, “Do More!”
I’m sorry, I’m truly frustrated and sound like a broken record. But I’m getting really sick of the standard answer we hear from too many “experts,” guru’s, sales/marketing managers. But doing more seems to be the universal solution to every selling challenge. The “thoughtful” posts from the guru’s show charts. They are all the same, focusing on dials, focusing on emails, focusing on touches. They run the math we learned in 3rd-4th grade (remember learning “times” tables). They develop the models, projecting yields from these efforts, projecting the results of those efforts. And we now know how to work the […]