Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Are You Winning Enough?
This may seem very basic, but I’m constantly surprised by how little we address the issue of “Are we winning enough?” Of course, there are a number of ways to consider and respond to the question. Most of the time, sales people and managers look at if from the context of the goal/quota. Their response is based on, “Are we winning enough to make our goals?” It’s a key question, but too often, if it looks like we are falling short, the immediate response is, “Go find more deals!” We see this in organizations that focus on volume and velocity. […]
Thinking About Objections
Sales people have always had a bit of a weird mindset on objections. We do everything we can to avoid them. We go through all sorts of training on how to “handle” them. We rehearse scripted responses to those we anticipate might arise, crossing our fingers, hoping they won’t. Somehow, we have this “negative” reaction to objections. Ironically, customers don’t seem to have this point of view. They don’t avoid them, they don’t go through training on “techniques for raising objections.” They just have questions, concerns, a point of view that may differ from ours. And they care enough about […]
What Is The Objective Of This Call?
Do you have a clear objective for each call/meeting you have with the customer? Is it aligned with the customer’s objectives for the call? I talk to 100’s of sales people every year. They are constantly busy making calls and having meetings, but when I ask them, “What was your objective? Did you accomplish it? Could you have accomplished more? Were you aligned with what the customer wanted to accomplish?” Inevitably, their eyes cross, I can tell they are thinking, “What is this guy talking about? We have to be talking to our customers?” Of course we do! But we […]
What If We Started With A Blank Sheet Of Paper?
Buying is changing profoundly. This impacts everything we do to try to engage our customers, creating value through their buying and usage journey. To effectively engage our prospects and customer, we have to rethink all our strategies and approaches in working with them. Somehow, our engagement strategies are less and less effective. Marketing (and sales) inundate customers and prospects with endless emails, texts, phone calls. The majority of these go into “spam buckets.” Customers increasingly choose to minimize sales involvement in their buying process, seeking digital and other sources to support their buying journeys. Social channels are increasingly cluttered and […]
“How Are We Doing….”
We’re all used to the email surveys, usually following some shopping or customer service experience. “Tell us how we did…” They ask a series of questions asking us to relate our experience. Inevitably, one of the questions is the ever present NPS question, “Would you recommend us to someone else.” Usually, these survey’s come after we have completed something, we’ve bought something, we asked for some sort of customer service. Whatever the case, the survey is about something that has happened, but now is over. Perhaps, organizationally, we assess the results from a collection of surveys, theoretically using the results […]
How Value And Value Creation Evolves
It’s imperative that we continue to evolve our thinking on value and value creation. Way back, in the old days, we created value for our customers by educating them about new products and solutions. The way customers learned about new things and how they might solve problems or addressed new opportunities was largely interactions with sales people. The value we created was educating them about products and services. Sales people used to be the primary source of information and learning, offering customers a view of what was going on both in and outside their companies. Customers didn’t have the web […]