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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
A Missed Customer Service Opportunity
At this moment, I’m sitting in the United Club in Concourse C at Chicago O’Hare. I should be sitting in an airplane climbing to 35,000 feet. Instead, I feel as though I’ve spent half my life in this club—and that’s just this evening. Delays are part of any road warrior’s life. You learn not to let them get to you, you roll with the punches, look at alternatives, or camp out in the nearest club. Today’s delay is different, and a tremendous missed customer service opportunity on the part of United Airlines. See, I was originally scheduled to leave on […]
“Well It Worked, Didn’t It?”
I’m constantly amazed by the misrepresentations, lies, and trickery sales people use to reach a customer–either to get a customer to answer the phone or to arrange a meeting. Every time, I think I know all the approaches and can protect myself from the offending sales person, someone gets through my defenses and with some sort of new trick. Not long ago, I got an email from a sales person asking for a few minutes of my time. I decided to speak with him, primarily because in his email he said, “I was speaking to Mr. So and So, and […]
Lean Sales And Marketing — Leaning Our Sales Process
Process is a fundamental part of “Lean.” We can’t possibly be Lean without process. The process provides a framework to ensure we are executing consistnely, effectively, and efficiently. It enabes us to measure results. It provides a basis to analyze what we do and onstantly improve. If we are taking a random walk to accomplish an outcome, we can’t identify those parts of the walk that create value, those parts that are waste, or how to achieve our outcome in the most effective and efficient manner possible. Without a process, achievement of a goal, perhaps winning a deal. is pure chance. Consistently […]
“Congratulations, You Are Now Part Of Our Strategic Account Program”
Whether we call them strategic accounts, global accounts, key accounts, or corporate accounts, these Very Important Customers are revered in our companies—usually because they give us a lot of money. I see lots of organizations creating Strategic Account Programs, labeling sales people as Strategic Account Managers, devoting resources and all sorts of other things, all with the goal of increasing revenue from the accounts. Sure we wrap a lot of fancy language about improving our relationships, getting closer to our important customers, and so forth—but really our goal is for them to spend more money on us. I’ve been on […]
Finding The Decision Maker
As sales people, we are trained to ruthlessly seek out the decision maker and focus all our efforts on that individual. Whether it’s to understand their needs, provide insight, pitch a solution, our focus is on finding the decision maker and locking in on that individual. We’re trained to ask pointed questions like, “Are you the decision maker?” There’s only one answer that a customer will give to that question–it’s “Yes,” or the variant, “Yes, I’m involved in making the decision.” As a side note, do we ever expect the customer to say, “No, I just had idle time on […]
Moving From The Teaching Pitch To A Collaborative Dialog
The art of the “pitch” continues to be escalated. The sales person has always had a role of “teaching” or “educating” customers. But what we teach them has and will continue to evolve. We pitched (too many still do) our products. Customer have never found this to be really valuable. They want the conversations to be focused on them and what they want to achieve. Product pitches were about us and what we had to sell. In the past, product pitches did play a role in educating our customers. Sales people taught customers about our product capabilities and how they […]