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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
Factors For Global Expansion Success
I started this series for OpenView Labs with a post, When Should You Consider Global Expansion? This continues with a discussion of some of the most important steps in preparing and executing your plan to expand globally. Visit OpenView’s site for the original post: Factors For Global Expansion Success.
Insight And Challenging Without Outcomes Is Just Dreaming
Our customers want insights–they want to learn more about what they could achieve, how they can improve, why they might change! In my experience, this has always been critical to engaging customers. Today, it’s just as critical, perhaps more so, because if we aren’t providing it, they can find it elsewhere. But Insight and Challenging the customer to think differently is not the goal, it’s only the beginning. Insight helps the customer to understand new possibilities and should instigate change. But that’s just the starting point. The goal, as it is in any selling or buying situation is to help […]
Insight Doesn’t Have To Be About Solving World Hunger
I had a fascinating conversation with a sales executive today. His team was inspired by Challenger and Insight selling, as so many of us are. They had gone through the training and were ready to start providing insights to their customers, transforming the customer engagement process, intercepting the customer before they had even recognized they have a problem or opportunity. After he went through the background, he then said, “We’re ready, we’re confident we can engage the customer in a different way, but we’re just struggling with coming up with meaningful insights to share with our customers.” I’ve heard others […]
We’ve Succeeded When We Stop Talking About…….
A number of years ago, I was working with a team of executives implementing some major changes to the organization and they way they worked. Previously, the team had attempted this change a couple of times and failed. Through the period of time, there had been constant reviews and discussions at all levels about what was happening and why things weren’t working. This time around, I asked the team, “How will you know you’ve succeeded this time?” We had a number of metrics in place, but we were looking for other indicators that people were buying in. After a bit of […]
Value Co-Creation Starts Internally
Recently, I wrote Moving From Value Creation To Value Co-Creation. Co-Creation is becoming an important concept, ultimately, being able to work with our customers, co-creating value will become very important–at least with our leading customers. We can’t possibly innovate fast enough to meet our customers needs to innovate and grow. Neither can our competitors. But if we can co-create with our customers, we can accelerate what we both achieve. We won’t co-create with every customer, we can’t possibly afford to, but it really isn’t necessary. Co-creating with customers who are innovators and thought leaders enables us to create unique value […]
The Right Stuff
The Right Stuff — a famous book by Tom Wolfe turned into a decent movie, was all about the very early stages of America’s space program. It’ a great book to re-read or read for the first time. Today’s organizations, we focus on lot’s of “stuff.” Do we have the right sales processes, do we have the right tools, to we have the right training, do we have the right programs, do we have the right metrics, do we have the right people, do we have the right insights? All this “stuff” helps make organizations and people more effective and […]