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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
Creating Social Business Success
Every week, I would venture there are over 100 blog posts or articles talking about Social Business. Too often, the focus seems to be about how business should leverage technology to more effectively reach customers. But, Vala Afshar, CMO and CCO for Enterasys, would point out, Social is a mind set. When you talk about “being social” with Vala, phrases like: Nothing’s more important than the customer. Collaboration is critical, it’s messy, but you can’t be social without collaboration–between people in your organization, with your customers, and your community. Social business demands share accountability. Without share values, you can’t be […]
MOVE Or Die!
Imagine, you are in the middle of a road, a car is hurtling at 60 miles per hour (100 kph) directly at you. It’s making no attempt to stop. The answer is pretty obvious, almost instinctual, you MOVE. You know if you don’t, you will certainly be hit and die. The action we must take is obvious, it’s instinctual, we take action instinctually. Our innate drive to survive causes us to move. Yet in business, every day we are faced with thing hurtling toward us—changing customer buying patterns, changing competition, changing business conditions. Yet we don’t move, we don’t change. […]
Following The Money
Any sales professional worth her salt knows to “follow the money.” Traditionally, we interpret that as, “Who has the budget?” While that’s important, it’s no longer sufficient for sales success, or more importantly, for our customers’ success. We have to follow the money much further. For any business, large or small, we have to understand, quantify, and communicate the impact of what we want the customer to do on the attainment of their organization’s strategic and financial goals. We have to come as close as we possibly can to expressing the impact we will have on Balance Sheets, Income Statements, […]
Customer Experience, “Being Managed Or Handled”
Every organization has (or should have) a process for “managing” customer problems. We all believe, that when a customer has a problem we have to resolve it, so we put in place resources, policies, procedures for managing the customer that has problems. And, with varying degrees, we “handle” and “manage” the customer problem. Within the customer service organizations, we chalk it up on our scorecards–another problem solved, another case closed, it took so many minutes, and the customer said “Yes” when we asked, “Have we solved your problem?” And, because it is so easy, we send surveys to the customers that […]
Avoiding Simple
It seems to be part of human nature to make things more complicated than they really are or than they need to be. Over the past few days I’ve been at the Forrester Sales Enablement Conference. Scott Santucci has driven a brilliant theme, calling for sales enablement professionals to become Simpletists—a combination scientist and simplifier. I’ve been surprised, there’s been some resistance to the notion. It got me to reflecting. Consciously or unconsciously, we seem to have a propensity to avoid simple and simplicity. We’re educated and trained about complexity. In sales, we refer to the complex sales process. We have endless meetings, developing complex […]
Lean Sales And Marketing–“Every Activity Has A Context”
I’m at the Forrester Sales Enablement Conference. It’s fascinating, I’ll have a lot more to write over the coming weeks. Last night, however, I was at dinner with a sales person. We had a fascinating conversation — at least I thought so. As a side note, I always start the conversation with, “How are things going;what do things look like in your accounts, territory; will you make your number?” Somehow, these conversations tend to become mini deal and account reviews. But the conversation was really fascinating. He had a number of very large accounts and we were talking about how he […]