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
Critical Skills For Sales Leaders
I’ve written a lot about the need for new skills for sales people, the traditional selling skills are in sufficient for success in the future. I’ve even gone so far as to suggest we stop training sales people in traditional selling skills, focusing on skills critical for the future. One might expect, the same applies for sales leaders/executives. After all, if the skills critical for sales success are changing so much, doesn’t that imply the same thing for sales leaders? Well, possibly–but mostly no…… The for sales leaders is different than the sales person’s job–it’s about leadership. The fundamentals of […]
Outcome Based Buying
Regardless how we sell, our customers are trying to achieve one thing when they buy. They are trying to achieve some very specific outcomes. Those outcomes may be all over the place—solve a problem, address an opportunity, enable other things to happen. In the case of selling embedded products, it may be to help customer achieve the goals they seek with the development of their new product. It may be to help our customer help their customers achieve certain outcomes. Just as the specific outcomes customers try to achieve will vary, how they measure their success in achieving those outcomes […]
Is Technology Hurting Or Helping Our Ability To Sell And Drive Revenue?
I was invited to participate in a roundtable on the topic, “Is technology hurting or helping our ability to sell and drive revenue?” It’s a fascinating topic, my response is an unequivocal YES!!! Before I go further, I have proclaim my obligatory fascination and bias toward all things technology. Most of my career has been working for or with leading technology organizations, spanning electronic components/devices, hardware/systems, licensed/cloud based software, all things communications including devices through the operating companies, through to analytics and AI. I’ve been on the founding teams of several very successful software and analytics companies. To further buff […]
What Do Icebergs Have To Do With Selling?
Yeah, I know it’s a tired analogy, but icebergs are still useful in thinking about marketing and selling. We all know about icebergs, the part of the iceberg we see is dwarfed by the part of the iceberg that’s under the water and we don’t see. We face the same with our marketing and sales efforts. Our focus is on what we see–customers actively engaged in the buying process. And typically. we see them after they have been looking at make a change for some time. We all know the data–the customer is 57-90% through their buying process before they […]
What If Every Electronic Outreach Cost $.50?
In the “old days,” (about 20-30 years ago), my VP’s of marketing used to come to me for approval on major marketing campaigns. In those days, direct mail/direct marketing was still a primary communication channel. Marketing campaigns could be pretty expensive, there was design, printing, postage (they were always stamped because people opened stamped mail more then metered and trashed bulk mail). Getting/developing the right list was critical–it was harder to get good contacts/addresses, and because of the expense, marketing wanted to make sure they were targeting precisely the right people, not wasting mailings on people that weren’t in the […]
Are Our Customer Conversations Substantively Different Than Internal Discussions?
The other day, I published a post, “Are Traditional Selling Skills Even Relevant Anymore?” It’s generated a lot of great ideas and good discussion on both sides of the topic. One of the premises I had in the article is that the skills/challenges we face in driving change within our own organizations, and that those customers have within their organizations are not much different than the conversations/engagement that sales people and buyers have. They are human to human discussions, with all the same characteristics–disagreements, disinterest, differing points of view, alternative views on potential solutions, fear, confusion, confusion, convincing, negotiation, reaching […]