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
Just Good Enough Value Creation
Thousands of posts are written about value propositions and value creation. By now, most people tend to say value is defined by the customer, though most implementations seem to be driven by what we think the customer should value. There’s also a lot written about differentiation, creating superior value, and exceeding customer expectations. There also seems to be a “silver bullet” aspect to value propositions and creation. Somehow, I get the sense of people looking for that magic set of sentences, that when spoken to the right people at the right time, they immediately pull out a PO, asking “How […]
What’s More Important, Experience Or Experiences
The other day I was speaking to a large group of sales people. Many were very new to sales, they had been selling for only a few years. During the conversation, one person asked how she should progress in her career. She and several others related they were looking for new jobs. They saw opportunities to move to new challenges, increase their compensation, move higher in the food chain. We all want to grow–we want jobs with increasing levels of responsibility, higher levels of compensation. Sometimes, we don’t like our current roles/organizations/managers, sometimes it’s a great new opportunity. Sometimes, however, […]
Manager, Are You “Sales Person Centric?”
We know we are supposed to be customer centric. Buyers and buying have changed, they’re in control (funny, I always thought they were.). Millions are spent in creating great customer experiences. As sales people we know we are more successful when we focus on the customer–helping solve their problems, understanding their needs. We seek to provide great insights and to teach our customers. Gone are the days of pitching or telling our customers about our products. We now know that success comes in collaborating with our customers, helping them grow and achieve their goals. We know by helping our customers […]
Getting Things Done Though Our People
Perhaps the most difficult thing to recognize in moving from an individual contributor role into a management role is that made you great as a sales person will be your biggest barrier to being an effective manager and leader. As an individual contributor, what probably made you a high performer was your ability to get things done–in the company, with your customers. These included prospecting and finding new deals, making sure they were the right deals, developing and executing strategies to win, overcoming competition, other alternatives. In virtually every case, what separated you from everyone else was the ability to […]
Differentiation, Dissimilarity, Disruption
Recently, I was being interviewed on value creation and differentiation. I was asked the question, “What’s the difference between differentiation and dissimilarity?” The question caused me to pause for a moment. Frankly, I hadn’t thought about it before, but the more I thought, it’s an important distinction for sales people and can become an important strategic issue for executives and business strategists. It’s easiest to understand these concepts if we take a walk into a friend’s garage. It’s an interesting, eclectic set of vehicles: A Porsche 911, an F-150 Pickup, Ducati and KTM motorcycles. Let me add to this idea. […]
Are You Creating Value Or Cost?
There are thousands of posts and hundreds of books on Value Creation. I’ve, in fact, written 285 since starting this blog and dozens of others at other sites. The themes in all of this stuff usually follow a similar line of thinking: Customers define value in their own terms. Sellers have to create value aligned with what the customer thinks is important. To win, we have to create more value than anyone else. From there, things start getting a little fuzzy, because we start wrapping pricing and discounting into the whole concept of value creation. Theoretically, we justify higher prices […]