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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
Your Value Proposition Is Irrelevant To Me!
You probably get a lot of the same prospecting emails that I get. Whether it’s someone trolling groups in LinkedIn, or somehow they’ve gotten your email address, I get dozens of prospecting letters each week. All of them are very predictable: They apologize for intruding. They talk about themselves and their products. They always present a compelling “value proposition” on work they’ve done with “organizations like yours.” I won’t waste my time on the first two items. By now, I hope we all know this is really bad practice. But, I’d like to spend time on the third point. I see lots of […]
Throw Away Your Value Proposition, It’s Meaningless!
Hold onto your outbursts of, “Dave, you’ve lost it!” Also, recognize that I may be playing a few word games–but with a purpose. I’ve become distressed with the state of thinking about “Value Propositions.” Too often, they are viewed as the “silver bullet.” Wishful thinking like, “If I just get the right value proposition, it will overcome any doubts or resistance a customer has, they’ll issue a purchase order….” I get requests for help, “Can you help me create a killer value proposition?” As if there is the one thing that will cause the customer to be interested. People thinking […]
When Are We Being Manipulative? When Is It Just Best Practice?
Few would promote blatant manipulation of the customer to achieve our goals. We are regaled with stories of sales people shamelessly manipulating customers. The manipulation may be outright deception about the capabilities of a product or service. It may be deceitful pricing or contracting processes. It may be taking advantage of a situation–perhaps a customer’s misfortune. It may be “bait and switch techniques.” It may be high pressure selling techniques. The methods of manipulation go back millennium’s to the very first sales transactions. There’ve been various labels applied to sales people using these techniques–hucksters, charlatans, or “snake oil” salespeople are […]
How Do You Stop A Sales Person From Talking?
Sales people love to talk. They want to talk about their company, their products, how their products and services help solve a customer problems. Turn them on, and they won’t stop, questions don’t deter them. That’s probably not an inaccurate, but perhaps slightly unfair generalization of sales people. But try an experiment with your team. Ask them to prepare a prospecting call with a senior executive, giving them the following instructions: You can’t talk about products and services, you can’t take any brochures or catalogs with you, you can’t do a Powerpoint presentation. Then role play the call. Once you […]
I Signed Up For An eBook……..
I saw an intriguing eBook being promoted by a company known for providing Sales Acceleration/High Velocity selling tools. It was on a topic that I have huge passion for. I respect the company and wanted to learn more from their research. I diligently filled out the form, hitting Submit, at 8:00 am. At 8:01, I had an email with the following: Thank you for downloading [Title Witheld] eBook. You can click here to access the eBook at anytime. (link deleted) To see how companies like [Company A, Company B, Company C] and others are using [Company Name] software to contact, qualify, […]
Sales Must Own And Solve The Content Marketing Problem!
Now hold on, count to 10, take a deep breath. For my marketing friends, I’m not betraying you and giving up on marketing. For those of you who’ve read my posts railing against sales people blogging, I’m not changing my point of view. I’m talking about a very specific marketing/content problem that no one other than the sales person can address. It’s marketing content for an audience of 1–at this very moment. It’s very unique. It’s content, that addresses my specific problem, concerns, and priorities right now–because they may be slightly different from those I have tomorrow. It’s content that captures […]