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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
Let Me Get Back To You…..
You’ve finally gotten a meeting with that key executive. It’s taken weeks to arrange calendars, the meeting has been rescheduled once or twice, but the time has come. You’re face to face with her–the key decision-maker. The meeting’s going well, but there it is, the question the customer asks–and you don’t have the answer. In the good old days, it used to be perfectly acceptable to respond, “That’s a great question, I’ll have to go back to the office and research it. Let me get back to you tomorrow (or whatever time period is acceptable)” As I said, in the […]
The Customer Designs Their Own Customer Experience
We spend a lot of time talking about customer experience design. There is some value to it, but there is also great danger (and arrogance) in it. We cannot possibly design the customer’s experience, we can only design how we engage the customer for those parts of their experience that involve us. The customer experience is theirs, and it’s different for each customer (individual). The customer experience is not isolated to “this buying decision” or to their experience with us. The customer’s experience started years ago, perhaps even before they even became aware of us or our company’s existed. The […]
Exchanging Value
The discussions revolving around my post, Moving From Value Creation To Value Co-Creation, has gotten pretty interesting. I thought I’d expand on some of the discussions that are occurring both on and offline. We talk about creating value for our customers. It’s a critical part of winning business. But we have to remember, value is exchanged between parties. (This will start to give you a clue about the expression, “there is no such thing as a free lunch.”) Value exchange was pretty easy to understand in the “old days.” We provided products and services that had a value proposition. Presumably, […]
What’s Quality Have To Do With Sales And Marketing?
Quality is a word I almost never hear in a discussion about selling. Sure, sometimes we sell the quality of our products and selling, but I almost never hear the discussion of quality in selling or marketing. It’s a sharp contrast to discussions I have with manufacturing, engineering, development, and even financial executives. Quality is an ingrained part of everything they do (at least in high performing organizations). When I ask sales and marketing executives about this, usually the answer is “We’re different.” Sometimes, it’s amplified, “Our work flow and processes need to be flexible and change with the customer,” or […]
Connecting The Dots, Can You Do It For Your Customer?
There’s a huge amount of “wisdom” about calling at the top. At times, I think we have to change corporate structures, naming far more C-Level executives just to accommodate the clamor of sales people needing to call at the top. Don’t get me wrong, we have to engage al levels that are appropriate for the solutions we present. But calling at the top for everything is just a foolish strategy. It wastes our time, it wastes customer time (those we really need to be working with) and it wastes executive time. It’s natural for us to inflate the importance of […]
Are You Prepared To Have A Customer-Specfic Conversation?
Insight is the word of the year. We are all being trained in providing insight–ideas about the customer’s business; how they might grow, opportunities they might be missing, how they might improve, how they might achieve their dreams and goals more effectively. If, we’ve done it correctly, we get the customer interested and the conversation begins. The conversation is the most important–and perhaps the most difficult. In order to maximize our value creation and our success, we need to get “up-close and personal.” Our conversation has to move through a number of levels–each of which requiring great knowledge. Regardless of […]