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
Virtual Selling Is Not The Future Of Sales! Part 1
As we emerge from the pandemic, there are a lot of discussions about the future of sales. A lot of the discussion focuses on virtual selling–leveraging technologies like Zoom, Teams, and others as key engagement approaches. F2F continues to play a role, but many of the “pundits” are declaring virtual selling to play the dominant role. These positions are usually supported by productivity and cost of selling data. I suppose, it’s human nature to look for the single thing that drives success. Perhaps, a century ago, pundits declared the future of sales was the automobile—we could see more customers more […]
Asking The Wrong Questions!
Our engagement strategies are, too often, failing us. I suspect it’s because we are asking the prospects (and perhaps ourselves) the wrong questions. At the lowest level of execution, we ask if they are interested in learning about our products or solutions. Or sometimes we are presumptive and tell them, without their asking. We are taught to ask about needs, but getting answers to those questions means the customer is actually fairly advanced in their buying journey. They have, through other sources, learned enough to be able to articulate their needs. We are taught to ask them about their problems, […]
Who Is OUR Buyer?
People like Hank Barnes, Scott Gillum, Ardath Albee, and Maureen Blandford are doing some great work in helping us rethink the question of “Who is our buyer?” In addition to helping us define our buyers in much richer terms, they are helping us think about how to incite them to buy. For years, we’ve had concepts around “Ideal Customer Profiles” and “Personas.” We’ve characterized our customers with things like firmographics and demographics. We proudly say, “We sell to the financial services companies with more than 10K employees and assets under management exceeding $10B.” That helps us narrow our focus on […]
What’s Your Ideal Customer Profile
Not every customer is “our” customer or even a potential customer. It’s common sense. We know we are supposed to focus on our Ideal Customers, those that are in our Sweet Spot. We develop, or at least we should be developing Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) to help focus our engagement strategies on the customers we can best help. Those that we help best are those that have the problems we are the best in the world at solving. Too often, however, our “selection” of opportunities we pursue, seems to be based on the criteria like, “They hit on our website…..They […]
Give Your Sales People What They Need!
My friend, Orrin Broberg, wrote a great post: 5 Critical Sales Enablement Mistakes To Avoid. His first point was stunning in it’s simplicity, we fail to give sales people what they need. It’s a critical issue, we have to understand, at a deep level, what sales people need to perform at the highest levels possible. But, too often fail and as a result, actually adversely impact performance or waste money, time, resources. There are several areas impacting this: As managers we are more concerned about what we need, often inflicting all sorts of stuff on the sales people. As well […]
Do You Have A Brain Trust?
Every two weeks, on Friday afternoon, I have a call with Brent. Once a month, on Saturday mornings, Ned and I speak. Mitch and I speak monthly, Jill and I speak monthly Kelly and I speak about every six weeks, Rene and I have a talk every 4-6 weeks. The list goes on, it’s about 15-20 people. Tamara, Hank, Glen, George, Scott, Mike, Howard, Shari, Alice, Charlie, Bert, Maria, and more. They are all great friends, they are in very diverse careers and backgrounds. Some are consultants, most are executives in various industries. They live in 4 continents. These people […]