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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 Engaging The Real Customers?
I was doing a series of deal reviews–not unlike most of the deal reviews I do. We were talking about the people involved in the buying process. What struck me in each discussion was how few people were being engaged at the customer — and that the right people weren’t being engaged, even by the customer buying group. Typically, the sales team focused their engagement strategy through one person–usually a friend or sponsor. Sometimes, there were a small number of other people involved. In the reviews, the sales people confidently said, “We’ve identified all the people in the decision-making process.” […]
The Problem With Account Planning
I was asked to sit in on a number of account plan updates. It’s mid year, so it’s time to pull out the account plan, blow off the digital dust, and update it. (you might be getting an idea of what I think about most account planning processes.) The structure of the account plans looked like 99% of the account plans I have seen (and if I’m honest, some that I used to develop decades ago). The first few pages were about the customer. Some financial and business data was presented—revenues, profits, growth. Some of the strategies and priorities for […]
It’s Not Always About The Deal
One of the things I see too many sales people doing is focusing only on the deal. That is, when we finally find and qualify an opportunity, our focus is on the deal only. We have meetings with the buying group, we focus on all the things we need to do to move the deal forward, winning a PO. Every conversation is about the deal, where the customer is in their process, and what we have to do next. But we miss the opportunity to enrich our relationships and continue to teach our customers. Sometimes we focus so much on […]
Changing Our Mindsets
Our mindset impacts how we think of and engage our customers. It impacts both our conscious and unconscious behavior. It impact the language we use in talking about and talking to customers. The mindset for sales and marketing seems to be, increasingly, oriented to the things we do to our customers. Our language and processes betray this thinking: We “target” them with our messaging/prospecting. Our “battlecards” guide us on our engagement process. We qualify them for opportunities. We move them through our selling process. If we are “sophisticated,” we phrase it as their buying process–even though we constantly “sell.” We […]
Systems Of Alignment
As we reflect on the process of getting things done in business, one of the most important principles is the concept of alignment. Perhaps, simplified to, “How do we get everyone in the same boat, rowing the same direction, in cadence, at top speed?” As one looks at consistently high performing organizations, we see fanatic alignment—usually starting with a highly aligned culture, values, and leadership that models the expected behaviors. And, as you look in every corner of the organization, you find universal alignment and ownership–people have internalized these things and own them for themselves. By contrast, the majority of […]
Raising My Game
I find myself, increasingly, writing posts about the terrible state of practice in selling. There are the posts about terrible prospecting, clueless sales people, horrible managers. These posts generate a lot of attention and activity. The comments, likes, and shares skyrocket. I suppose it’s human nature, we all have so much fun calling out obviously bad performance. And sadly, there are too many examples of horrible sales practice. It becomes too easy to call these out. It really isn’t a problem with the sales people we call out, it’s a management and leadership problem. It’s managers that encourage and train […]