Dave Brock

Forensic Prospecting—I wish I could claim inventing this term, but the words popped out of the mouth of a client as we were discussing prospecting approaches.

There’s an untapped gold mine of prospects that sales people overlook or take for granted.  These are customers that have done business with us in the past—as far back as we can possibly imagine.  We lose contact with too many customers–organizations and individuals, yet they represent a tremendous source of business to us.

Many years ago, we undertook a series of surveys with about 10 clients–across a spectrum of industries.  We looked at all the customers that had purchased in certain years, let me call that the “baseline year,”  then looked at the purchase patterns in subsequent years.  (I’m oversimplifying the analysis for the purposes of this post, if you want details, ask me).  Across all the customers, we found remarkably similar patterns.  In the first year after the...

The sales organization is responsible for executing the company strategy with customers!  No if, or’s, or but’s!  But too often, I see sales people and managers failing to do this.  They focus on the same old things—the same customers, the same segments, the same products.  It’s natural human behavior, we sell what we are comfortable with to those customers we are comfortable with selling to. 

But company strategies are evolving.  If companies want to grow, the strategy is simple. 

1. Develop and introduce new products to sell to our existing customers
2. Sell our current products to new customers in new segments.—-”You mean we have to find new customers????!!!!  We actually have to prospect????!!!!” 
3. Sell to new “personas” in our current customers or new customers (either current or new products)—-this is an area of huge fear with sales people.  “You mean we have to call on new customers and develop new relationships...

There’s a lot of talk about the role of the sales person as a “Teacher.”  It’s an important concept, but one that’s always been a key element of the sales person’s role.  But I think there is a lot of misunderstanding of what effective teaching really is.  So much of the literature seems to focus on Teaching As An Event.  There’s a lot of discussion around the Teaching Pitch. I’m probably overstating this, but it conjures up the image of that single impactful presentation where the customer immediately says, “Yes,” and pulls out an order form.

Somehow focusing on an event and the Teaching Pitch seems an incomplete representation of the role of the sales professional as a Teacher or how our customers learn, make decisions, and achieve outcomes.

I’m fortunate that one of my clients is a leader in the professional development of Teachers.  Specifically, they are transforming the practice of teachers in K-12, improving their ability to achieve desired outcomes with...

Like most of us, I’ve come to rely on—and use as an excuse—constant on-line accessibility.  Email, Twitter, blogs, instantaneous web access.  Imagine my  panic walking into the office this morning to find no web access!

My morning routine is usually, look at my calendar and priorities for the day, quickly process email, spend some time on Twitter and the various social sites, do a blog post.  I spend the first hour of the day on those things, then I head to meetings, calls and so forth. 

But this morning was different, the web in the office was down!  I was tempted to run to the nearby Starbucks for Wi Fi, but decided not to.  I decided to do a web free morning (perhaps day, depending on when web service came back up).  OK, I cheated, I looked at email on my Iphone, deciding there was nothing crucial that I needed to respond to.

I started to work.  I’m only two hours into my day and taking a bit of a break to write a...