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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
Live By Your Products, Die By Your Products!
We’re in love with our products. At the drop of a hat, we will wax on endlessly about features, functions, feeds, speeds, and, of course, price. We get all hot and lathered about the product and want to get our prospects and customers hot and lathered about our products. The good news, if that’s what the customer cares about, and they have a few million idle dollars hanging around, they might buy our products. But here’s where we struggle. Not a lot of folks have idle money hanging around. So they can’t buy our products, regardless how hot and lathered […]
The Seller’s Process Or Journey
x Connect via LinkedIn Subject Message Connect Yes, you read it correctly. The title of this post is the Seller’s Process. I’m not trying to play word games, but rather suggest that we (sellers) need to dramatically shift our points of view about how we engage prospects and customers (buyers), along with that, change the words we use to describe the process. Let me explain what I mean by starting with the customer–which is where everything really should start. There are thousands of post, articles, books glibly talking about the buying process, the buyer’s journey, the customer journey. […]
How Well Do I Have To Know My Customer?
x Connect via LinkedIn Subject Message Connect There are some interesting discussions about the amount of research required to prospect and engage customers. Inevitably, the search is for the right answer—or probably realistically, it’s “give me the answer I want to hear.” The answer we want to hear is, “What’s the minimal amount of work I need to do to be able to contact and engage a customer?” The reality is probably something more like: It depends, and Regardless of the answer, you have to do the work. And it probably all evens out in the end, meaning–there […]
Context, The Ultimate Sales Differentiator
Everyone is enthralled with content these day–Thankfully! Content’s not new, just most of the content generated sucks. We have data sheet after data sheet, millions spent in brochures. Of course there’s always the standard corporate presentation, with the ever so important logo’s slide. It’s usually the second or third slide and it really is a “brag slide,” “here are all the wonderful customers that bought from us…” Fortunately, leading marketing and sales enablement folks are moving content into a new realm. They are “customerizing” it, perhaps even humanizing it. It’s targeted to personas, it’s targeted to markets and industries, it […]
“The Modern Buyer Is Digitally Driven, Socially Connected…..”
There’s no doubt digital technologies and social media are changing the way we live, engage, and do business. Their influence is huge and the growth rate continues to accelerate. I read all the stuff that says everything’s moved to the web. I don’t disagree, but I don’t agree. Some would have you believe all we need to do is spend our time on the web, leveraging social sites and tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tinder (oops) and others. We’re inundated with words liked Digitally Driven, Socially Connected…. Out of curiosity, I decided to try to figure out what that really […]
Moving Into Our “Discomfort Zones”
As sales people, we get frustrated with customers that are slow, reluctant, resistant to change. We want them to embrace change, moving forward; because moving forward presents us an opportunity to sell. But turn the mirror on ourselves, and we are as reluctant as everyone else to change. We cling to what we have always done, we resist, we stay rigidly entrenched in our comfort zones. Even when nothing is working! We may do what we have always done with greater intensity. We may wrap a veneer of the latest technology around it, not enabling us to improve, but rather […]