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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
Do You Understand Your Differentiation, Does Your Customer?
Over the past few weeks, I’ve written a number of posts about Value Propositions and Pricing. They’ve generated a lot of conversation in various venues. One of the things that’s struck me is the lack of discussion on differentiation. I think it’s an area too many of us assume the customer understands, or we simply fail to demonstrate. To capture the customer’s attention and compete, we know we have to have a powerful value proposition–expressed in terms of what the customer values. We know that we have to provide powerful business justification, aligned with the financial and strategic objectives of the […]
CRM And Oysters
I’m at Gerhard Gschwandtner’s and Selling Power’s Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. If you haven’t been to one of Gerhard’s conferences, you are missing a real opportunity to learn. Not only are Gerhard’s observations about selling provocative and insightful, but he puts together an agenda of fascinating discussions about sales and leveraging technology. As I listened to all the presenters and discussions yesterday, it struck me that CRM is becoming a lot like oysters. That probably takes a little explanation. Years ago, I started eating oysters on the half shell. I consumed trays full of them. Like probably 90% of people […]
Don’t Confuse Buying And Selling!
I feel like I’m about to emulate the famous Gordon Gecko speech in the movie, Wall Street. In this case, “Selling Is Good! It helps our customers, it helps our companies, it is the foundation of our economy!” OK, maybe I’m over reaching a little. But, lately I’ve read a number of articles that seem to confuse selling and buying. We have to be clear, we are sellers! Our roles and responsibilities is different from those who buy. But there are those that seem to think that all that counts is buying. “Forget the selling process, it’s the customer’s buying […]
There’s Insight, Then There’s INSIGHT!
Our customers are starved for ideas and insight. That’s why, the sales professional who calls offering insight is likely to be more welcomed than the sales person who just “shows up and throws up.” But we all know this. But there are hierarchies of insight, it’s critical to understand these and the impact in engaging the customer. There are very general levels of insight, “We see these trends in business which may impact you.” There are industry focused insights, “These are things happening in the XYZ segment which may present opportunities for you.” There may be functional levels of insight, “Manufacturing/Engineering/Finance/HR/Sales/Marketing […]
Do We Really Understand Value?
My recent posts, “But Your Price Is Too High,” and “Price Is Meaningless Until You Establish Business Value,” have stimulate heated discussions and debates on LinkedIn and other venues. What’s struck me is we still have very fundamental misunderstandings of value, value propositions, and how we understand, create, communicate and deliver value to our customers. While I’ve written about these issues a lot before, I thought it might be useful to recap and summarize many of the key issues around value. I won’t go to the depth I have in individual posts (just search under Value Proposition) and you can […]
“But Your Price Is Too High”
It’s the customer’s moral and business obligation to always challenge you with, “But Your Price Is Too High.” This isn’t a problem or issue. What is the problem, is the mindless response from sales people, immediately offering a lower price. Or even worse, anticipating the objection, discounting in advance–it doesn’t preempt the objection, it just means you have to discount further. For an objection that happens in every single sale, you would think sales people would be so much better at handling it, but the most common response is a discount, without any understanding of what’s needed or why or […]