Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Building A Better “Social Business”
Recently, I had the privilege of speaking with Ed Abrams, Vice President of Marketing for IBM’s Small and Mid Sized Business Segment. Ed has some fascinating insights on how any business can more effectively engage customers in meaningful conversations. At the end of the post, be sure to listen to the interview, I learned a lot conducting it, I’m certain you will learn from listening. We covered a lot of territory in the interview–some of the highlights: We spent some time talking about what “being social” is, something I think many of us get wrong when we think about social […]
Customer Decisionmaking, Like Herding Cats
I’m the proud “father” of Sammy and Harley—that’s them in the picture. It took my wife and I 30 minutes to get them to “pose.” You can see the picture is out of focus–I had to take it quickly, Harley is ready to jump and run. Trying to get the cats, individually, to do what I want them to do really hit and miss—but getting them both to do something is……….. Well, anyone who has been around cats knows this is Mission Impossible! (Funny, how they always get me to do what they want). Working with customers is a lot like herding […]
How Will The Customer Pay For It?
I’ve written before about how many opportunities we inappropriately disqualify because the customer doesn’t have the budget. If you’d like a refresher, look at “We Don’t Have The Budget.” I’ve gotten a lot of emails on this topic and realized I needed to continue to expand on this. It’s important that we understand how the customer is going to pay for whatever they are or that we want them to buy. If we don’t understand their budgeting and funding process, so much of the time, we’re just crossing our fingers and hoping. Hope isn’t a sales strategy! We know we […]
Turning Your Value Prop Upside Down
We’re all proud of our value propositions! We feature them in our web sites, we’re trained to brag about them to our customers. Usually, when I hear people describe their company’s value proposition, the focus seems to be all about the company or the product. We provide the most advanced social selling CRM platform in the world! Our products have the highest levels of reliability of any in it’s category! We have more features and functionality than other provider of [fill in the blank] in the industry! Our price performance exceeds that of everyone in the industry! I’ll stop here, […]
Pipeline Stench
Here’s an idea for some clever software entrepreneur, add “smell” to pipeline management software. Sometimes, I really wish we could “smell” our pipelines, we would be overwhelmed by the number of dead, stagnant, rotten deals and the resultant stench. (By the way, I will insist on a royalty from anyone adding this feature to their software.) It’s amazing the number of sales people and organizations I encounter claiming to have great pipelines. I look at the pipelines, they are filled with deals. If the organization has some sort of “coverage” model, for example, 3, 5, or more, they always have the […]
Insight, Change, And Value
I’ve been writing a lot about Insight recently. In the course of the posts, I’ve gotten really outstanding and intriguing comments, both privately and publicly. Clearly Insight is important—it always has been, always will be. What we label as Insight may have evolved. We may have taught customers about products—we still do need to teach them about products, whether it’s sales people or through content we create. We may have taught them about solutions to problems they have had. We may have taught them about new ways to run their business, new opportunities, how they might improve. Those are all various […]