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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
You’re Making The Number, But Are You Achieving Your Potential
I’m an unapologetic believer in the concept, “It’s your God-given right to 100% share of customer and 100% share of territory.” Everything I’ve been taught, everything I’ve taught or coached has been around maximizing the full potential in the “territory.” While it’s impossible to achieve, this mind-set totally reshapes the way one thinks of opportunities, growth, and success. It reshapes the way you approach and engage your customers. Whether at an individual or organizational level, we must always strive to maximize our ability to achieve the full potential. So, I frequently become frustrated in conversations with sales executives and people who focus on […]
Price Is Meaningless Until You Establish Business Value
This afternoon, I was speaking with a salesperson for a start-up company. We were discussing one of the biggest deals they had ever gone after, both he and the company really needed this deal. Unfortunately, he was showing me the closing presentation after he had presented it to the customer. Two charts caught my eye. The first was the final chart–the deal chart. It started with the normal list price of the service being offered, then there were some other numbers culminating in a “Special Offer” that was 80% off the normal pricing of the offering! Yes, straight out of […]
Sales Forecast Accuracy, Demand Planning And Other Ramblings
I’ve been involved in a number of conversations about my positions on Sales Forecast Accuracy recently. I wanted to share some thoughts provoked by those very good conversations. The Sales Forecast Is Not The Demand Plan! The demand plan is the basis for scheduling manufacturing (or service delivery). It ripples through the manufacturing schedule, inventory planning, shipping, procurement, supply chain management. Ultimately it impacts cash flow and revenue/expense forecasting. The demand plan is critical, but it’s not Sales responsibility. The Sales Forecast is an important component of the demand plan, so forecast accuracy is important. But it is only a component. Many […]
Going Beyond Cost – Benefit Analysis
A critical element of any high impact sales process is “creating business justified solutions.” I’d venture a guess that fewer than 20% of the deals I review have even the most rudimentary business and financial justification. For too many, sales people provide a price, and maybe a list of features and benefits that might be translated to business value–but we encumber the customer with the job of justifying the solution themselves. Everyday, I read blog post after blog post about dealing with “discounting and price shoppers.” Questions about pricing and discounting dominated discussion groups (probably second to finding qualified prospects). […]
Don’t Cheat Your Customer By Not Closing
My post, “But Will I Sound Too Salesy?” generated some interesting comments and discussions. A sentence from Dominic’s comment struck me. He shared an experience in a sales training class: “They thought the actual close suddenly transported them into the realms of a door-to-door encyclopedia salesperson, which they felt was suddenly grubby.” If we are doing the right job engaging customers in discussions about improving their business and achieving their goals. If we are focused on showing them how to achieve results they couldn’t do otherwise, we are cheating them by not closing, by not gaining their agreement to go […]
“But Will I Sound Too Salesy?”
I just got off the phone with a business owner. We were having a great conversation about how he and his team were growing the business. We were talking about some of the conversation he was starting to have in selling to larger enterprises and struggles they were having in their conversations with these customers. We went through the conversations, discussed how he might shift the direction, focusing more on their needs and the business value his company would create. At one point, he said, “But doesn’t that sound too sales?” It’s something I hear all the time. I expect […]