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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
On Forecast Accuracy
I’ve been having a fascinating discussion on forecasting and forecast accuracy. While we will never be perfectly predictive, we can get better than the current forecast discussions as illustrated below: Manager: “What’s your forecast for the quarter?”Salesperson: “What number do you need?” But we spend a lot of time talking about forecasting, without looking at the real underlying issue. Let’s imagine the case that we can be 100% accurate in our forecasts (no I’m not smoking anything). Having an accurate forecast is relatively unimportant if we are only achieving 50% of the number we should be achieving. Of course, when […]
Challenging The Status Quo
A sale will never happen until the status quo is challenged in some way. Perhaps, the customer has experienced problems or challenges. Perhaps they are discovering new opportunities they want to pursue. They decide to change, initiating, among other things, a buying journey. Too often, the customer doesn’t recognize the need to change. They are too busy to notice things could be better. They may think, “If it ain’t broke….” They may not be aware of a better opportunity….. Or they may feel the pain of change is greater than the pain of doing nothing. But they need to change. […]
What’s Driving Your Customer’s Need To Buy?
Understanding what’s driving our customers to change, to address a new opportunity, to solve a problem is critical to our success as sales people. We need to understand what’s driving their need to buy. However, too often, when I ask sales people about the need to buy, they describe it in terms of their products or solution category: “They need to buy HR Software” “They need to buy servers” “They need to buy IT Development services” “They need to buy our semiconductors” “They need a CRM system” “They need to buy…….” We can never describe our customer’s needs to buy […]
Obsessing On The Competition
The sales call started nicely. The sales person started asking me questions about my business, what I wanted to achieve, challenges we faced. He asked the alternatives we were considering. Then things went south, really quickly. He asked me what I like about the competition. At first, I thought it a clever approach. He might then start to talk about his solution in the context of the things I highlighted. He could help me learn about his company’s approach to dealing with the same things. He might help me think about different ways to achieve the same goal. He might […]
Removing Obstacles!
When you look at the job of the sales person or that of the manager, at it’s core, it’s really about removing obstacles. For sales people, it’s about removing obstacles to our customers’ success. It’s helping them achieve their goals–business and personal. It’s helping them recognize there are things that may be blocking them from realizing their goals or dreams. It’s helping them navigate all the things that get in the way of their moving forward, to help them develop and execute a plan. Managers and leaders, likewise, have the same responsibility to their customers–their people. Their job is to […]
Talking About Virtual Selling
I’ve been asked to participate in a podcast on virtual selling. I’m looking forward to it, it’s an important topic. When I was originally asked, I replied, “What do you mean by virtual selling?” I think that’s a fundamental question, one that I’m not sure I know the answer to. But I think I know what “Virtual Selling,” isn’t. To too many, it’s about using tools like Zoom, Teams, and other tools. To others, a major part is WFH. These may be components of Virtual Selling, but Virtual Selling is probably much more and much different. Likewise, many think Virtual […]