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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 Would Be So Great If It Weren’t For Those Friggin Customers!”
I’m stunned by how many sellers hate their customers! Sit and talk with a group of sellers talking about the past week or so. Comments like, “They are so stupid…. they are clueless…. they don’t know what they are doing….Turkeys!” Those comments aren’t just limited to customers. Marketing, legal, pricing, product management, managers……everyone else become subjects of our frustration. And, likewise, many of those people express their frustration with sellers in similar ways, marketing, sales enablement, sales, ops, management, customer experience, often say to themselves, “Those sellers are just so incompetent….. Why don’t they do their jobs…. We’d be better […]
Discovery, It Isn’t All About Us
Continuing my series on selling skills we thought we knew but really don’t understand, I’m want to focus on Discovery. It’s a natural follow on to qualifying–actually it’s a complement, qualifying and discovery go hand in hand. Some misunderstanding we have about discovery. We tend to think of it as a “stage” in our selling process. We prospect, qualify, discover, propose, close….. So we do discovery at certain stage, check that off, go onto the next stage. Another fundamental misunderstanding is that discovery is for us. We ask the customer lots of questions about their needs and requirements. We try […]
Do More, Do Better, Do Differently….
We are driven to grow, to drive much higher levels of revenue and attainment. As I study organizations, three strategies emerge. Do More is the dominant strategy I see. It’s a simple strategy. If we want to make our numbers, if we want to grow, all we have to do is more. Increase sales by 50%? Easy more prospecting, demos, more deals, more pipeline, all very predictable. And when we have everyone working 7×24, then we hire more to do the same thing. More SDRs, AEs, sales engineers. Sometimes, there are nuances. For example, more tools present phenomenal scaling capability. […]
Having Sales Conversations…..
Imagine, you are sitting at an airport, on a plane, perhaps in a Starbucks, or at a large event and you start talking to a stranger next to you. It doesn’t matter who starts the conversation. But how does it start? Perhaps both of you just shared a common experience–you saw something happen near you. “What did you think about that speaker?” “Did you see that…?” If you are on an airplane, it may be, “Is Paris your home, or are you going on from there….?” Or, “That book you are reading looks interesting.” Or, “How is your trip going?” […]
Meeting And Call Planning, Getting The Most Out Of Each Meeting
I’ve been revisiting a lot of selling basics. We take for granted that people, us, understand the basic of selling. What we do, why we do it, who it’s for….. The reality is few training programs address these things well, focusing instead on how we do these things. And, over time, we forget these basics, running on autopilot. We just do what we have always done, moving unconsciously through our and our customer’s days. And we can see the results of this! Customers don’t want to see us, they prefer learning through other methods. They tell us we don’t understand […]
Qualifying, A Primer
I’ve been writing a series of posts about selling basics. Too often, we take for granted that people understand these. We toss the words around, assuming people understand what we are talking about, what it means, and how it works. In reality, people don’t understand. The link to the series is here. I’ll be adding more over the coming weeks. Today, I’m focusing on qualifying. Yeah, I know many of you will say, “Well dugghhh, Dave, we know all about it and how important it is, after all, we’ve been selling for years…..” The reality, as I review pipelines, win/losses, […]