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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
Knowing Where Our Customers Live
Too often, our problem as professional sales or marketing people is that we think like professional sales and marketing people. “Duh, Dave….thanks for sharing……” We see things from our perspectives. We’ve got great ideas and insights, we’re anxious to demonstrate our knowledge and prowess to the customer. We’re really enthusiastic about our products and solutions, we just know the value that customers can get from them! We’ve got our jobs to do, things to achieve. We see all sorts of opportunities for our customers, we want to help them achieve their goals and grow. All this is great. The best […]
The Helpful Sales Person
We want to establish relationships with our customers. We want to be helpful. But sometimes being helpful isn’t helpful–to us in achieving our objectives and to the customer in achieving theirs. Our customers are very busy. They have too much on their plates, they get diverted. So we try to be helpful, in order to move things along. We start doing things for the customer. Sometimes being helpful is helpful. We may be able to get some things done faster or more effectively than the customer. We may take some of the tedious stuff they have to do in their […]
Can Insight Become Commoditized?
Forgive me for thinking out loud. Insight–selling with Insight is what everyone is talking about these days. It’s an interesting bandwagon, there’s money to be made, so everyone’s trying their own approach. In my mind, I fast forward a number of years. What happens when every sales person brings Insight to the customer? What happens when every sales person is coming to the customer with ideas for growing and improving their businesses? Is it possible that Insight might become commoditized? As I thought about it, I realized the real winner in this imaginary world is the customer. Imagine sales people […]
Creating Discomfort
My friend, Tim Ohai, wrote a brilliant guest post today: Cooperation Is For Losers. While the entire post is great, one sentence struck me, “You have to be disruptive to the point of discomfort……” That sentence probably makes many of you uncomfortable, it runs counter to what so many opinions we may have about selling. We want to build relationships, we want the customer to trust us, we don’t want to rock the boat…… But having a “comfortable” customer is the worst thing possible for sales. If the customer is experiencing no discomfort, they have no reason to change, no […]
Experiencing What Our Customers Experience
Too often, there’s a huge disconnect between our organizations and our customers. Our customers and prospects are frustrated with us and we don’t understand the frustration. We design our engagement processes, our support systems, our communications. We create what we hope to be a great Customer Experience. Yet the customer actually experiences something else. They don’t get it, we don’t get it, there is a giant disconnect. Let me step back a couple of decades. I was heavily involved in the automotive industry at one point in my career. At the time, customers were complaining about quality of US manufactured cars. […]
Laziness Takes Too Much Time And Effort!
In several posts recently, I’ve been railing against lazy, unimaginative selling. I have to confess, I have no tolerance for laziness, and tend to be pretty hard-nosed when I see it. Pardon my venting, but I just need to let it out. Laziness is all around us, but it’s often hard to spot. Often it’s cloaked in a frenzy of busyness. We see it everyday. It’s the tired old email campaign–poorly written, poorly executed, poor follow up (If you want to see me rail, read “The Email Query.“) It’s not preparing for the sales call. After all, we’ve made 100’s […]