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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
Insight Without Action Is Just Idle Chatter!
Today, we are all trying to engage our customers with Insight. But so much of what people think of as Insight ends up prompting no reaction from the customer. Perhaps, they might say, “Thanks for sharing.” Maybe you’ve gotten them more interested and they respond, “That’s interesting stuff.” Or you’ve gotten them hot and lathered and they say, “Wow, I’ve never heard that before!” But if we don’t produce a compelling response, “We’ve got to do something about this situation–now,” the insight is just a nice discussion. The purpose of our Insight is not to just to share interesting data […]
Maybe It’s Us That Keep Our Customers From Moving Forward
Surely I must be a heretic suggesting it’s sales people that keep our customers from moving forward. After all, don’t we give them new ideas about their businesses? Don’t we talk about the new things our products and services enable them to do? Don’t we demonstrate how wonderful things could be with our shiny new solutions? Customers look at those, some get all hot and lathered. “Wow, that’s brilliant stuff!” “You’ve got a great solution!” “Wow, I can really see the value of that!” Yet they don’t move forward. They don’t buy. They remain rooted to what they currently do, […]
“Let’s See How Much We Can Confuse Our Customers!”
I actually wanted to title this, “Let’s See How Much We Can Screw With Our Customer’ Minds,” but decided against it. I know no company would purposefully try to confuse it’s customers, making it very difficult for them to understand their offerings and buy. Unfortunately, that’s an unintended consequence of a lot of what I see happening in too many Go To Customer Strategies. Recently, I was reviewing the Go To Market Strategy of a software company. Actually, I was doing some competitive analysis for a client and struck gold. My client’s competitor had done what too many others do. […]
But My Manager Doesn’t Coach!
If you are the sensitive sort, particularly about this topic, you may just want to skip this post, I’m a little angry. After writing, Who Benefits Most From Coaching, I was deluged with emails and comments on various forums. All had the same basic theme: “The managers in my company don’t seem to care about coaching.” Or, “It is non existent in my company, how do I get coaching when managers don’t want to coach?” I was surprised and disappointed by the number of sales people expressing those sentiments. I don’t understand “managers” who don’t view coaching as a critical element […]
“What Can You Do For Me?”
Wipe away all the fancy words and stuff we talk about in selling, the fundamental question we have to confront is that which is most important to the customer or prospect, “What Can You Do For Me?” And here’s the crux of the problem for far too many sales people. They don’t know! (As a side note, when I pose that question to a sales person, the more they start waving their hands around, the more animated they get in talking about their product, the more I know they are clueless about the answer to that question.) Think of all […]
Who Benefits Most From Coaching?
Sometimes, I feel like I may be living on a different planet. I read all sorts of articles about coaching from some very thoughtful, smart, and successful people. Many of those articles have provocative titles or themes like, Who Benefits Most From Coaching? Where Should You Spend Your Time Coaching? Should you focus on A’s, B’s, C’s? The list goes on. In many ways, the articles make huge amounts of sense. Intellectually, I get it, I agree with the concepts the authors are talking about. I can even get the math many people use–“raising the performance of an A player 10% […]