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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
Selling The Way You Buy
Today, I had a great text conversation with an outstanding sales manager. The time zones worked out–it was evening his time, so he had the time to be a little philosophical, it was morning my time, I was desperate to find something to write about. We were talking about general approaches to engaging customers more effectively. He had read an earlier article of mine about the topic and had questions. At a certain point in the conversation, he said, “I’m a buyer now, it’s changed everything I think about in how we sell….” It’s a fascinating point. As I reflect […]
Five Months And Counting, An Update
About 11:30 AM, on March 11, 2020 my plane touched down at John Wayne Airport. On my way home, I decided, I would be locking myself down for a period or time. Actually, the State of California was deciding this for a lot of it’s citizens, but given what I was hearing about the Pandemic, I knew it was the right thing to do. At the time, like many others, I thought this would be over after 2-3 months and I would resume my “road warrior,” lifestyle. It’s 5 months later, both my clients, most of their customers, and I […]
Are You So Busy Chasing Small Deals, You Are Missing The Important Deals?
I’m often amazed looking at the pipeline profiles of a lot of enterprise focused sales organizations. There is, often, a feeling the average deal size is significantly higher than it actually is. Usually, the average deal size, when you analyze the data, is significantly smaller than they think it is. A recent, somewhat extreme example with a large professional services company; they thought their average deal size was significantly above $5M. but when we actually did the analysis, the average deal was in the $350-500K range. Another organization, thought their average deals were above $250K, the reality was the average […]
What’s Important To Your Customer?
We know our solutions have to create value for our customers. The challenge, however, is making sure that value we create is important to our customers. Too often, we focus only on the cost of our solution. We compete on the basis of price, too often making sure our price is less than those of the competition. Sometimes we try to create some justification for our higher price—“We have more features, functions, bells, and whistles…..” Implicit in this approach is the customer already knows the benefits of implementing the solution, so the most value is created by the lowest price. […]
Our Customers Don’t Know What They Don’t Know
Recently, I was in a discussion with a group of outstanding sales people. They were talking about how to align their selling process with the customer buying process. One of the sales people asked, “How do we learn their buying process?” Some readers may think, “Isn’t this obvious?” After all, classically, we know we have to do discovery, what are their needs and requirements, who’s involved, what is their decision-making process, what alternatives are the considering…… It’s all sales 101, so why do we struggle so much in understanding the customer buying process. Implicit in these questions is there is […]
On Measuring Sales Performance
It’s becoming increasingly complicated to measure sales performance–particularly in complex B2B sales. We are used to setting quotas and measuring our progress against those quotas. But our measurement systems are getting increasingly complex. First, as we look at leveraging teams to sell complex deals, I hear increasing concerns with, “Who do we credit?” Particularly, when many people contribute and we need to credit different people. Second, are we measuring the right things? Is revenue/orders the only thing we should be measuring? Are there other goals, equally important to achieving our overall organizational goals, that we should be measuring? I think […]