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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
How Easy Are You To Do Business With?
I have to admit, I’m writing this out of a little bit of frustration. I have a prospect, it’s virtually impossible to communicate with them — at least through the normal channels. Now, you may say, “Dave, don’t you get it–they don’t want to talk to you!” But they really do want to talk and communicate with me. They say so, they get upset when it appears that I’m not communicating with them. They originally contacted me a couple of months ago. I got an email from a mid level executive in the company. He wanted some information, I responded–rather […]
Media Business In Trouble
The media business is changing. Traditional media–newspapers, journals, and magazines are struggling to refine their business models. Figuring out how to make money and continue to grow is a challenge for all in the media business. As a consumer of both traditional and new media, I want to see them survive, grow, and thrive. I subscribe to a lot of “traditional” media as well as new media. One of the great trends I see is publishers adopting “any time, any place, any device.” For example I can read some of my favorite newspapers in hard copy, or, when I’m not home, […]
“Have I Got A Deal For You!”
The phone rang, I picked it up. The voice on the other end went into it’s pitch, “Hi, I’m so and so. Would you be interested if you could invest in a stock that could give you a cud-jillion-billions return in 60 days?” Yes, it was one of those pointless boiler-room calls. But is was a slow day, I was a little bored, so I decided to have fun. “Yes, I’d actually be very interested in getting that kind of return. However, before you go further, would you mind if I asked you a couple of questions?” I could hear […]
Differentiated Value —- Just Good Enough!
These days, so many of the conversations among sales professionals and pundits is about challenging our customers, about getting them to think differently, about creating superior and differentiated value. I talk and write about it a lot, as do many others. Sometimes, when I sit back and re-read what I write, or some of what others write, I get the impression that what we challenge ourselves and all sales professionals to do is the functional equivalent of “solving world peace.” Sometimes we make the process of challenging, changing the conversation or creating value just too complex (I guess that’s what […]
What Do We Do Next?
Every year, I sit through hundreds of deal reviews. They all seem to go the same way. The sales person talks about the deal, the competition, what the sales person or team has done. Too often, too much time is spent reviewing and discussing past history. However, at some point in the review, the discussion shifts to, “What do we do next?” Often, there’s a bit of an uncomfortable silence. Then a lot of random ideas start surfacing, “We should probably meet with…..,” “Maybe we should do this……, ” “Let’s do a demo…..,” “Let’s have one of our executives call […]
Are We Allowing Ourselves To Be Commoditized?
My colleague Anthony Iannarino wrote an outstanding post: “Mismatched Skills And Value Creation.” Usually, Anthony and I are so aligned in our thinking that we tend to complete each other’s sentences. But I had to disagree with part of his post, it was the perspective he presented on Commodity Buyers. Virtually every product and service, at some time in it’s life cycle moves to commoditization. As differences between offerings become smaller; as buyer familiarity with the products, solutions becomes greater; as perceived risks to the purchase decision become much smaller; then there is the potential that our offerings become commoditized. Given […]