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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
Selling Internally
We know the importance of selling internally. We get support, resources, and commitments to help us close deals with our customers. We get the programs and products we need to better penetrate our territories. Selling internally is critical to our success and ability to accomplish things. So it’s the same with our customers. To accomplish what they want, they have to sell internally. The problem is, too often they don’t recognize the need to do this. See, buying has changed. It used to be that come in with a great idea, great value proposition, great justification–the customer selects you, and […]
Are You Creating A Sense Of Urgency With Your Customers?
I do deal reviews with sales people every week. Too often, I hear the same thing, “The customer is busy right now, they’ve asked me to call back in 30 days.” 30 days becomes 60, 60 becomes 90…… We keep those deals in our funnels. We won’t let go of them. We diligently follow-up at the appointed time, then reschedule for the next time, and time goes on. We’re afraid to let them go, it took so many prospecting calls to find a customer willing to talk and consider us. So we’ll be polite and wait and wait and wait. […]
“Can I Give You A Quote?”
Within the space of 45 minutes today, I get two calls from sales people–each selling something completely different. The first sentences out of their mouths were essentially the same, “Dave, I’m Joe Smith (we’ll say), from XYZ Systems. I wanted to see if I could provide you a free quote for……….” The answers in both case were easy, “No,” and they pleasantly thanked me and hung up. Hmmmmmm………. What kind of prospecting calls were these? I wish they were unusual, but they aren’t. I lose count of the number of calls I get on a weekly basis offering to provide […]
The Ability To “Figure It Out”
There’s a great article in the Harvard Business Review, “Figure It Out.” Be sure to get a copy of it. The ability to “Figure Things Out,” is critical for sales and business success. But it seems we overlook it, or try to “engineer” all our support systems around providing all the answers and direction. We create sales automatons that can follow a process, that can learn a pitch, that can leverage the tools. As I read articles about critical characteristics for sales people, I never see “the ability to figure things out” as a recruiting characteristic or something we […]
Insight Is All About Having A Point Of View
Insight is all about having a point of view, but too often I see sales people who don’t have one or who are afraid to express it to the customer. Having an opinion or point of view is the starting point for maximizing your value creation for customers — and your own personal sales success. So often, when I speak with executives, managers, and sales people about the importance of an opinion or a point of view, there is real fear. “What if I’m wrong?” “What if the customer disagrees?” “What if they don’t care?” They’re worried about looking bad […]
Good News, We Won! Bad News, We Won!
Over the past few weeks, I’ve published a number of posts on pricing, value creation, walking away. They’ve stimulated some interesting comments and discussion. As I’ve read many of the comments, it struck me that we need to talk about whether we really want to chase after every opportunity. Too often, we’re driven to win business–at any cost! We chase deals, get emotionally attached to them, are desperate to close them because we need them badly. We end up discounting, to painfully thin margins, sometimes entering into unprofitable deals. We do everything we can do get business–any business–even bad business. […]