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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
Buying Is Human……
Some readers will look at this title, thinking, “Here Dave goes, getting all philosophical on us….” But, if we are to succeed as sellers, it probably pays for us to better understand buyers. We know all sorts of things that go on in buyer’s minds. Lately, we’ve heard a lot about FOMO and FOMU. We know buyers struggle with deciding, they struggle in their buying groups in reaching/maintaining consensus. We know they struggle to make sense of the conflicting information that deluges them through their buying process. We know decision confidence is a huge concern. We know, after they have […]
Foundations Of Value Creation
Customers buy value, not price! We know the importance of creating a strong value proposition–something differentiated from the alternatives. Something that has great meaning to the customer. We know that if customers don’t realize that value, we won’t maintain the relationship. They may have remorse with the decision, they may choose not to renew or grow. Over the past few years, we’ve begun to learn the most important area of value creation has less to do with our solutions, but more to do with how sellers help customers in their problem solving process. Inciting customers to change, helping them recognize […]
Should Sellers Do Their Own Research?
I see a lot of discussions about “forcing sellers to waste selling time by doing their own research.” Increasingly, I see people recommending outsourcing this research, freeing the time up to make more calls. Clearly, too many sales people don’t know how to do research, as a result, they waste a lot of time. There are many that don’t leverage the tools effectively. So there is a lot of room for improvement in the research that sales people do. But I would never take the research responsibility away from the sellers, whether they are SDRs, AEs, or some other role. […]
“You Have To Make Your Number With Only 50% Of Your Current Prospecting Calls!”
We know the incessant mantra around maximizing the number of calls we make every day. We know, almost daily, we have to make more calls than we did yesterday, last week, last quarter. Fewer customers are responding, so to make our numbers, we have to make more calls. What if we tried something different? Let’s try a thought experiment, imagine this challenge, “You have to make your number, but we’re only going to allow you to make 50% of the calls you are currently making!” Yeah, I know you are thinking, “Dave, you are crazy, we have to make more […]
Squandered Opportunity
Selling is tough! I can’t imagine more of an understatement. Despite all the tricks, techniques, and gimmicks the guru’s foist on us, selling is never easy. We are trying to incite our customers to change, we are trying to help them navigate a very difficult process, we are trying to help them make a decision–for which there may be a good amount of personal risk. Overlay on this, the fact that customers are averse to dealing with sales people. Every time I look at the research it changes, a few years ago, 43% of customers prefer a rep-free buying experience. […]
Who’s Your Competition?
We, sometimes, assess ourselves against the wrong competitors. We think our competitors are those organizations providing similar products and services. We analyze their products/offerings, we look at their market strategies, how they position themselves with customers, how they create value. In developing our competitive strategies, we take these analyses, figuring out how we can be perceived as better than them. Perhaps some new features and functions are added to our products. We copy some of the good elements of their strategies, or we try to one up them, being a little better than them in certain aspects, trying to differentiate […]