Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Adding Value–Selling To The Professional Buyer
Somehow, we think selling to Buying (Procurement and Sourcing) professionals than selling to “end users” or functional departments. Most of the time we look upon the experience with dread. We do everything we can to avoid or go around them. We try to get the end users to override them. We believe their function is solely to hammer us for price. We’ve been taught to sell solutions, to be consultative, to focus on value creation–but all that goes out the window in dealing with Procurement Professionals. Talk to Procurement Professionals and they say the same thing. They say, “Sellers don’t […]
Managing Complexity
It should come as no surprise to anyone that has been semi-conscious over the past decade, that our worlds are becoming increasingly complex. Our jobs, and those of our customers are more complex and difficult. Fewer people doing more. The rate of change is accelerating. We have too little time to accomplish even our “A” priorities. In a recent IBM CMO Study, 79% of the respondents expect high/very high level of complexity over the next 5 years, yet only 48% felt prepared to deal with it. There are lots of technologies, some of which many of the readers may sell, that […]
The Almost Perfect Sales Management Article
The other day, I read, The Science Of Building A Scalable Sales Team, by Mark Roberge of Hubspot. It was almost brilliant! What resonated with me is the radical simplicity with which Mark approached (and described) building a sales team. In a world where too many try to overcomplicate things, Mark’s article cut to the essence of building high performance sales teams. Summarizing: Hire the same successful sales person every time. (P) Train new hires in a consistent measurable way. (S/T) Provide our sales people with the same quality and quantity of leads each month. (S/T) Work those leads with the same […]
Technology Is No Substitute For Thinking
There are a lot of great technologies that can become indispensable to sales professionals. Great sites to research things going on in our markets and with our customers, CRM tools, playbooks, and all sorts of other sales aids. Each of these can help magnify our impact and effectiveness with customers. They can help make us much more productive and accomplish a lot more each day, week, month. However, I’m often amused by some of the emails or telephone calls I get. It’s as if technology has run amuck. Likewise, when I review things sales people are doing, I see terrible […]
Lean Sales And Marketing — The Role Of The Manager
Managers play a critical role in the lean sales and marketing organization. It’s different from we think in the traditional organization. In the traditional organization, there’s the belief we work for our managers. We all know the corporate hierarchy and pyramid. In too many organizations, managers spend too little time coaching. They are busy in meetings, they are busy with paperwork, they don’t have time or the skills to work with their people. Too often, they look for blame, rather than understanding and solving problems. In the Lean Sales and Marketing organization, the pyramid is inverted. The role of the […]
If It’s Common Sense, Why Isn’t It Common Practice?
I was having coffee with a close friend, @francineallaire, this morning. She’s an outstanding sales professional. As we often do, our conversation drifted to the challenges of professional selling. We talked about how sales people have a tendency to make things overly complicated. So much time is spent on techniques to catch the customer’s attention. In the worst case, some resort to trickery and manipulation. More often, we fail to connect with customers because we talk about what we want to talk about, not what they want to talk about. Other times, we simply are wasting our customer’s time. As we […]