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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
Marketing And Sales–Nimbleness, Agility, Flexibility
My post, Marketing Displaces Sales, created a lot of comments and discussion. It’s clear, our customers want to be engaged in different ways. They don’t care about the title on someone’s business card, they want timely, relevant, high quality information. They want relevant discussions about their business and goals–regardless of whether it comes from the sales person, account manager, marketing, product management, customer service, or the receptionist (they sometimes give me the right answer-when all else fails). Redefining our customer engagement models, our processes, our workflows, our roles and responsibilities, skills—and yes our metrics and compensation models–is critical to aligning with […]
Dear Occupant, I’ve Got Insight!
Insight is a key differentiators in the value we create for our customers, throughout their buying process. The insights we provide, the ability to help the customer think about their businesses differently is critical both to their and our success. Driving different conversations moving into co-creation changes everything about buying, selling, our value and our relationships with our customers. So I’m troubled by the notion of the Insight or Teaching Pitch. It somehow seems like a “Dear occupant or current resident, I’ve got ideas about your business.” Maybe I’m confused about Insight. Ideas are ideas–probably actually commodities, though our egos […]
Marketing Displaces Sales!
Customers are self educating, they don’t want to see sales people until they have completed the majority of their buying process! We all know this–much to the chagrin of sales. Companies are responding, as they should with great content strategies. Marketing is providing rich content and relevant information for customers and prospects. Great organizations are leveraging social channels, complementing the content, responding to the continued customer need for information and education — the way they prefer to be informed and educated. Marketing becomes the primary channel to the customer for much of their buying process. So we get confused, what’s […]
Co-Creation Critical To Selling Solutions
For years, we’ve been trained, “Customers want solutions.” The best of us try to sell solutions, moving beyond just product features, functions, and benefits. To a large degree, we’ve trained our customers to expect this. They engage us looking for solutions, listen to our presentations, discuss them, and ultimately buy. In reality, our solutions are just a component of the solution our customers are looking for. All of us live in complex adaptive systems. Both our own companies and our customers’ organizations represent a constantly changing and evolving set of interactions, shifting priorities, agendas, needs, systems, and processes. To be successful […]
Mobility, Life And Work Recreated
Mobility is changing the way we work and live! As a preface to this article, I’m excited to announce the launch to the 21st Century Sales Warrior Guide To Mobility. It’s been a collaborative efforts from thought leaders I hold in the highest regard, including Matt Heinz, Bob Apollo, Bob Thompson, the Aberdeen Group–led by Peter Ostrow. The guide contains thought leadership pieces, market research, video’s, infographics, and other materials. Our hope is that it helps you crystallize your thinking about mobility, what it means to your and your organizations! I’m grateful to SAP for sponsoring this outstanding piece. You can download […]
Stop Worrying About The Questions Your Customers Are Asking!
Don’t get me wrong, you have to be responsive to your customers. You have to provide compelling and meaningful answers to their questions. But even your best responses to their questions are not likely to be sufficient to differentiate you and win. In today’s very tough B2B sales world, it’s very difficult to differentiate our offerings from those of the competition. Tough competitors are always very close in features, functions, capabilities, even pricing. The quality of products, the reputations of the companies are very similar. There are small nuances or differences, but they are rarely the deal winners. So your customers is […]