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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
Key To Great Customer Experience
We know the importance of customer experience. Whether it’s their buying experience or their experience in implementing or using our solutions, customer experience is key to our success. It’s what causes them to buy, repurchase, and recommend. Billions are being invested in customer experience. Whether it’s improving our products and services, improving their digital experience, improving their buying experience; investments in customer experience are increasing. No one would ever argue that customer experience is unimportant or irrelevant to acquiring, retaining, and growing our customers. But there’s an aspect of customer experience that doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention, […]
It Isn’t About You, It Really Is About Me!
I got an interesting prospecting note recently. It came, as so many do, disguised as a LinkedIn invitation. Honestly, I do try to look at these things to see if there is some value, something I can learn from the invitation, or from the individual if we connect. With this one, perhaps the biggest learning is how not to do things. Anthony is right, no one needs another random LinkedIn connection. But apparently, Anthony is trying to do so. As I read the invitation, rather than making the connection about me (a possible prospect), or even our potential shared interests, […]
Changing The Questions
We know questions are critical to our success as sales people. Sadly, we ask too few, choosing instead to pitch our products and solutions, hoping the customer has some interest in considering them, though we often don’t know why. Most modern selling programs talk about the importance of questions, but too often they focus on the wrong questions: Do you have funding for this project? Who’s involved in the decision making process? How will it be made? What alternatives are you considering? When will you make a decision? What are your needs and requirements? We can go on endlessly, whether […]
Start With The End In Mind, The Tyranny Of More, Part 2
I wrote, “Tilting The Numbers In Our Favor, The Tyranny Of More.” In that, I suggested we might actually be more effective if we started thinking about how we accomplish our goals by doing less. The basic premise is that to do less and still achieve our goals, we have to do much better. We have to increase our win rates, increase our average deal size, compress our sales cycles, improve our prospecting, improve how we engage our customers, create great value in every interaction. I’d like to extend that discussion. While I think focusing on “getting better,” has a […]
Tilting The Numbers In Your Favor, The Tyranny Of “More”
I have tremendous empathy for sales people and what they face as they struggle to make their numbers. It seems the mantra is always “do more.” The solution to anemic pipelines is “do more prospecting” (that seems to be the magic solution to every sales problem). Alternatively, it’s “do more emails,” do more cold calls,” “do more customer meetings,” or “do more research,” or “do more with your accounts,” or any other things that focus on volume. We have an obsession with volume, specifically volume of activities. If the volume of activities we currently conduct aren’t producing what we need, […]
Is Leadership Really About Solving Problems?
All of us, me included, often think a key aspect of leadership is about solving problems. Whatever the problem–a strategy problem, a market problem, a product problem, operational problems, sales/marketing problems, people problems…… We tend to think of ourselves as problem solvers. It’s that ability to solve problems that probably got us promotion after promotion in the first place. But as you think about it, it’s actually the height of arrogance and/or vanity. The idea that our ability to solve problems is the key to our organizations’ success is hugely popular in modern business thinking and hugely off course. Think, […]