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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
Anticipation and Preparation
The other day I watched an outstanding video by Tibor Shanto, Preparation Trumps Rejection. Tibor focuses on how to increase your prospecting effectiveness and deal with the potential of rejection. Be sure to look at it. Tibor’s comments prompted me to think about the importance of “Anticipation” as part of your preparation for every engagement you have with your customers–not just in prospecting. I watch sales people preparing for a call or customer meeting. They know what they are trying to achieve, they think about the questions they want to ask, what they want to present. They may bring others […]
The Early Bird Gets The Worm–Lessons For Sales
We all know customers are changing the way they buy, driving changes in the way we must sell. The traditional role of a sales person as an “educator,” is disappearing. It used to be that customers relied on sales to learn about new solutions and how they could use our products to solve their business problems. Customers, now are leveraging the plethora of information on the web–displacing the need for sales to educate and inform. This drives real changes in the sales process–it pushes sales engagement with the customer to much later in their cycle. Customers leverage the web, leverage […]
Earning The Right To Be A Value Creator
Yesterday, I wrote about Value Creation. One individual raised an interesting point in a discussion on LinkedIn. He said his customers really value his approach in value creation. They saw it as a differentiator and is was important in differentiating himself from others. But he went on to say that he didn’t get the same positive response from new prospects. This is a great issue, it’s one that impacts anyone who is “Challenging” their prospects. I think the problem is that we have to “earn the right to Challenge or create Value.” Challenging must have a foundation built on trust. […]
Do Your Customers See You As An Interruption Or Value Creator?
We struggle to get customers to see us. There are hundreds of blog post, articles, training programs, and other sources that offer ideas in getting customers to respond to our emails or calls. Hundreds on getting meetings with customers. They range from sound advice, to various “time tested techniques,” to trickery and manipulation, to “miracle cures.” It seems customers have an equal number of techniques to avoid meeting with us. They just don’t respond, they put up barriers, they create gate keepers, they make it difficult to identify who in the organization we should be talking to. We wonder, “Why […]
If Your Sales Organization Is Underperforming, Would You Know?
“Well duuuuuh Dave, what a stupid question, isn’t easy to tell? After all, isn’t easy to tell, we’re either hitting our numbers or not?” Hitting the number is how we tend to measure sales performance, but it’s really a terrible indicator of whether the organization is performing to the highest level possible. Hitting the number only tells you that you’ve hit the number–but it tells you little about performance. Let’s look at some real examples I’ve encountered in the past few years: Perhaps arrogantly, I called a sales executive of a large company and suggested his sales team had a […]
Who Are The “Sales Influencers” In Your Company?
Lori Richardson posed a very challenging question at Focus.com: “What is your definition of a “sales influencer” in a B2B organization?” I struggled with this for a while, all the natural answers came to me–it has to be the sales force, but we can’t forget marketing…… The more I thought of this, the more I became convinced that while that may be the current answer, it really shouldn’t be “the answer.” The answer really needs to be everyone in the company. Sales and marketing are really the last mile, or perhaps the most visible people within the organization, but we […]