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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
Just Because We Have The Ability To Do Something Doesn’t Mean It’s Best Practice
I’ve been writing about customer experience, bad prospecting, and other bad sales and marketing practices for some time. I continue to be amazed by the ever increasing volume of bad practice—from both the naïve and from those who should know so much better. Technology enables us to do wonderful things. In can dramatically increase our productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency. We can do things faster and in higher volumes than we have ever done before. We can dramatically reduce the costs and of our content development/delivery, marketing, demand gen, marketing programs. We can customize everything–though we seldom to. Technology not only […]
How To Ruin A Great Customer Experience
I took my car in to be serviced the other day. The dealership has done a fantastic job in designing a great customer experience. I made my appointment online, it was easy to choose a time that was convenient for me. The day before they sent me a reminder and introduced me to “Dale,” my service advisor. I showed up at the appointed time. Since my car is web-enabled, apparently it had been “talking” to the service department even before I arrived. Dale met me, greeted me pleasantly, then said, “This is what we need to do to the car […]
Marketing And Sales Alignment Or Integration?
I’m fascinated about a lot of the discussion about marketing and sales alignment. Inevitably, the discussion narrows to MQL’s and SQL’s. The alignment discussion inevitably focuses on gaining agreement on the definition and metrics surrounding these two metrics. Some of the things discussed are, agreement and alignment around the definition of lead quality and lead volume. Usually marketing is saying “sales isn’t following up on our leads, consequently we’re losing lots of opportunity.” Sales takes the position, “The leads we get are crap, just because someone wants a white paper doesn’t mean I should be wasting my time calling them.” I still […]
Teaching Our Customers To Sell
I recently wrote about Teaching Our Customers To Buy. In the article I mentioned the importance of customers selling within their own organizations. To many, that’s an unnatural, detestable act. After all, if they wanted to sell, they’d be sales people, wouldn’t they? “Selling,” internally, is critical to people getting things done and moving their initiatives, strategies, programs forward. Within organizations, there’s always selling going between people and groups, but people don’t tend to think of it that way. Too often, also, people are relatively naïve about how to get what they want within their organizations. They think, “I put […]
Prognostications And Wild Ass Guesses For 2015
We’re officially into the fourth calendar quarter of the year. It’s the time where you start seeing various pundits dusting off their crystal balls guessing what the big issues facing sales and marketing professionals in 2015. It’s also the time, various publications ask my views–even though at times I think my crystal ball is a little murky, I’ll contribute to those. I worry that I start showing my age, that I start looking old/crotchety, or that I appear slightly cynical. But every time I read these articles and start discussing the big issues for the coming year, I get this […]
Teaching Our Customers To Buy
By now, at least if you’ve been reading the literature on selling, we know the importance of Insight, Commercial Teaching/Learning, or whatever you call it. The focus of these are to help the customer realize there are opportunities they may be missing. There are opportunities to grow, to improve their businesses, to reduce costs, to improve their customer experience, to respond more quickly to competition —- to recognize the need to change. If we’re successful at this, we get the customer all hot and lathered to change. To do something different, to take action. Now the hard work begins. With […]