Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Ending Sales Heroics
Get any group of sales people together and we start exchanging war stories. Usually, they involve how we saved a deal, usually it’s at the last moment, usually it’s a huge noteworthy deal, and too often it involves a pricing action (“We sweetened the deal for them….”) Listen to any sales kick-off speaker and, usually, there are a few stories about their own sales heroics—the big deals they won that got them to this stage. I have to admit, it’s a lot of fun to exchange these stories, there’s always the friendly competition of “one-upping” each other. In the moment, […]
We Need To Stop Making Things Easy!
We seem to be, individually and organizationally, fixated on making things Easy. To be honest, the job of selling complex B2B solutions isn’t and shouldn’t be viewed as easy. Customers buying B2B solutions are not confronting an easy task (otherwise, we wouldn’t have 63% ending in no decision made). In are quest for easiness, we are cultivating a mindset in our organizations that does not match the reality of our buyer’s worlds. We are spoon feeding everything to our people, setting expectations that things should be easy. Too many wait for demand to be generated….. They won’t prospect because it’s […]
“Customers Won’t Buy Until They Are Ready To Buy”
Recently, I had a discussion with someone, actually a polite disagreement. I was advocating, “Disrupting customers’ thinking, getting them to recognize new opportunities, inciting them to change and buy.” This thoughtful individual, was upset with my position. Among other things, he made the statement, “Customers won’t buy until they are ready to buy. We have to wait for them, then be prepared to work with them in their buying process.” He’s absolutely right, customers will never buy until they are ready to buy. But his statement made me think of the old Maytag Repairman commercials. They were bored on their […]
Are Sales People Afraid Cold Calling Will Die?
My apologies, up front, I have been trying to resist plunging into yet another discussion about cold calling. The proponents of cold calling (I’m one) and the opponents of cold calling are about as likely to reach agreement as the Democrats and Republicans in Congress are. We each tend to be staunch in our positions, showing zero flexibility in looking at another alternative. I had committed to extricate myself from these discussions, because they don’t seem to accomplish much. But here we go—-again. What provoked me is a very thoughtful article by Daniel Disney on LinkedIn: Are Sales People Afraid […]
Is “Figuring Things Out” A Critical Sales Skill?
It seems much of the trend in sales is to provide our sales people all the answers they need to cover every situation. We provide sales automation tools that instruct the sales person exactly who to call and what companies. We script the conversations, providing questions that get the answers we want. We provide playbooks, we provide endless amounts of content, new programs, ready to send emails. All the sales person has to do is follow the playbook, stick to the script, blindly make the next call on the list. We focus and instrument everything a sales person should do, […]
Responsibility And Character
Every once in a while, I’m driven to write about something outside sales and business. Today, I’m driven to comment on things that I’ve seen in the news over the past couple of weeks, months. Unfortunately, sometimes it takes tragic events to wake us up, to help us remember who we are as human beings and contributors in building our society. We are all shocked by yet another school shooting in Parkland, Florida. We wonder, “How many more will it take until we take action to change?” Our elected officials point fingers and make excuses, yet it is the actions […]