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
Our Customers Need To Do A Better Job Of Buying!
A few years ago, I was talking to a sales manager. He was expressing some frustration, “I’m doing my job of selling, my customers need to start doing a better job of buying!” When you think about it, there’s actually a lot of truth to that statement — at least the “doing a better job of buying” part. Our customers do a bad job of buying because they don’t know how to buy. With the exception of purchasing professionals, it’s not our customers jobs to buy, they focus on doing their jobs whether it is building products, running an operation, […]
We Have To Call At The Top!
Conventional sales “wisdom” encourages us to “call at the top.” Sales people constantly seek the “C-Level” executives, looking for anyone that has a “Chief” in their title–surprisingly customers are accommodating us with CMO’s, CIO’s, CFO’s and so forth. We’re taught to call at the top–things move faster, we don’t have to worry about all the users, just find the top executive, pitch them, and everything will go fast. I often coach sales people on their deal strategies. Always, I hear, “We need to figure out a way to get to the CIO,” or “If only we could get to the […]
So Much Has Changed, So Much Is The Same
This past week, in New York, I had the pleasure of having breakfast with Mack Hanan. Mack is the author of Consultative Selling, originally published in 1970. Whenever I’m in New York, Mack and I get together to talk about the state of the profession. I started my sales career in the late 70’s. In that time, so much has changed, yet so much has stayed the same. Customers were busy then–they are still very busy. Though, in reality, I do think they are busier today than in the late 70’s. Continued cutback’s, the “leaning” of organizations, fewer resources–in hindsight, […]
I Don’t Have Time For Social Media!
The other day I was having dinner with a close friend. He’s the President of a division of a company. Eventually, the conversation got around to social media (is it something about me?). He said, “Dave, I just don’t get it, you keep talking about social media and how important it is, but I just don’t get it, I don’t have time for it, my customers aren’t using it. As we continued our conversation, he started saying, “I don’t have time to blog, I don’t have time to read blogs—even yours—and I really like your stuff (my ego was bruised […]
Reinforce And Enhance Your Sales Training With Product Training
The other day, my friend Kelley Robertson wrote an outstanding article: Is Your Sales Training Putting Your Sales Team At Risk? The article prompted me to think about: Why is product and sales training separated? What would happen if we integrated our sales methodologies and training into our product training? Companies invest lots of time and money in developing product training with every new product they launch. Usually, this training focuses on training the sales person on the product features, functions, speeds and feeds. Often, it includes competitive positioning, sometimes it includes elementary objection handling. Usually the training focuses on what […]
Metrics–The Secret Weapon Of Sales Managers??
Several days ago I wrote: The Most Used, Useless Metric In Sales. At the same time, I posed a question in LinkedIn asking people their opinions on the worst metric in sales. I was surprised by many of the responses. They included quota and revenue targets in every form–monthly, quarterly, annual. They included pipeline metrics, many variations of activity metrics and lots of others. Some of the metrics were very bad, many were simply bureaucratic reporting-having little to do with assessing sales performance, some represented micromanagement on the part of managers. What surprised me were the number of mentions of […]