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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
It Really Isn’t About The Numbers!
All of us focus on the “numbers.” We are driven to “make the numbers,” because those are our goals and we are driven to achieve our goals. When we miss the numbers, we panic, we whip ourselves into a frenzy of activity to do more–all in service of making the numbers. When we achieve our numbers, we “high 5,” start thinking about the President’s club, maybe even the accelerators we might achieve by surpassing the numbers. The challenge is we become slaves to hitting the number, often forgetting to understand what the numbers mean. It’s the things we do, how […]
What If They Aren’t Looking?
We know that customers are moving increasingly to a digital buying journey, supported by sales. We all leverage the web and digital buying as much as possible–largely because of the convenience, often because we can get deeper insight and learning through our digital searches, rather than seeing a sales person. The customer’s digital buying journey is critical to all of us in sales and marketing. First, the customer is indicating their potential interest through their search and digital engagement. Even if they aren’t yet ready to buy, just the fact they are searching gives us a huge opportunity to engage, […]
Are We Underperforming Our Potential?
It’s the end of the quarter, we’ve hit our numbers. We take a moment to celebrate, high 5 each other and revel in the success. And hopefully, we repeat the performance the following quarter, then hit our numbers for the year. We’ve met our goals! But what if we could have done more? Not just exceeding our quotas, but what if we reassessed what we do, how we do it, and realized that we really should be doing much better? That our goals actually were too low. Recently, I wrote that Buying Is Broken. The majority of buying journeys actually […]
Buying Is Broken, What’s This Mean For Selling?
It’s so intriguing, we see our customers and prospects struggling with buying. According to research, the majority of the time they fail in their buying journey, abandoning it. And this is for people/organizations that recognize the need to change. It doesn’t account for those customer that don’t recognize they have problems and should change. Buying is, without a doubt, broken! One would think this would drive a change in how we sell. After all, if buyers aren’t succeeding in buying, it seems to achieve our goals we need to help them fix this problem. We need to help them succeed […]
What If You Couldn’t Discount?
How would buying and selling change if you couldn’t discount? What if the price is the price period? There would be no more, “If you give me an order by the end of the quarter, I’ll give you X% off…” or, “We’re running a promotion….” or, “What if I could come in Y% lower than the alternative….” or, “For you, we will offer a special price….” What if the price was the price? What if there were no discounts for making a decision sooner, no discounts for who you are as a buyer, no discounts even for volume or phase […]
How Important Is Price?
Price is important—of course, but sometimes I think we, sales people, make it more important than it is to the customer. Too often, pricing, moreover our willingness to discount, is the centerpiece of our sales strategies. First, the customer will always say that prices is important. It is, customers want to pay a fair price, they want to make sure they are getting the best pricing they can get. They want to make sure what they are buying is affordable. With that said, there is a lot of “open space” in those statements. First, price is meaningless unless the customer […]