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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
Is Your Closing Presentation Meaningful To Your Customer?
Recently, I’ve been reviewing a lot of closing presentations. It’s been for a variety of companies, in different industries, giant and small, around the world. They are all resoundingly the same—and deficient. They’re also a reflection of our sales strategies, so they are, to a degree a reflection of how we have positioned ourselves with the customer. Here are some things I’ve observed: They’re all about us: First, there are always 3-4 “corporate glamor” pages. These are the pages that brag about our companies. They’re filled with how big we are, how many employees. There is always at least one […]
Win Or Lose, Do It Fast!
The only thing worse than losing is losing after a loooonnnnnnng sales cycle. I’m constantly amazed at sales people investing time and resource chasing bad deals, but too many fall into the trap and stay there. It’s tough finding opportunities these days. Many sales people are desperate to find something, anything, get a prospect to find a deal. We struggle to find someone that’s willing to meet us. We get that meeting, the customer expresses some interest—or at least that’s what we think we hear. Immediately, we latch on, we put it in our pipeline, we assign a 25% probability […]
The Key To Differentiation
Differentiation is critical to sales. It sets us apart, enabling our customers to distinguish between alternatives. In the absence of differentiation, it becomes difficult to win—often the differentiator is the price. Differentiation is increasingly difficult. Products increasingly look the same. Any alternative the customer is considering will probably do the job. There may be small differences in features, functions, capabilities–but these are wiped out with the next new release of a product from our competition. Company reputation—it’s size, strength, position in the market, and other things may be differentiators. But in today’s world of buying, it may not be. When […]
Customer Retention, Customer Service, Customer Experience The Rant Goes On
A couple of days ago, I ranted, in part, about my experience with my past computer supplier. We had depended on their computers for many years. Over the past several weeks, I have had power supply, battery problems and related issues. I’ve spent hours on the phone with customer service representatives. Each one of them has been very polite and reassuring, “We will get your problem solved!.” As we’ve been “solving” my problem, I get passed to different departments. Each department is apparently responsible for a particular aspect of the problem. One is software and overall system, one is hardware, […]
Customer Retention, A Rant
Business is tough everywhere. As sales professionals, we struggle to find business and meet our quotas. Losing business that you had previously won is tragic. Over the past couple of weeks, a couple of companies that I have done business with have lost mine–perhaps not forever, but as a potential buyer, I will be very cautious about doing business with them again. The first is one of our company’s banks. We keep accounts in a few banks around the world. Originally, we established multiple accounts to help make it easier for our people to do business. Each account is a […]
“Pissing On The Ashes”
My post yesterday stirred some discussion, Stop Spending So Much Time Coaching The Bottom Of The Funnel. I thought I’d expand on it to clarify my comments. Annually, I sit in hundreds of deal reviews. Too often, the focus is at the end of the cycle–we’ve put our offer forward, we’re doing everything we can to win (Funny how we seldom spend a lot of time doing reviews on opportunities that we believe we have won). In reality, there’s probably not much we can do at this point. We’ve failed to convince the customer and last minute tactics or shifts in […]