Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Customer Experience And Silos
We organize our companies by function–sales, marketing, customer service, finance, manufacturing, development, an so on. I suppose the management science guru’s thought it the most efficient way to organize and run a company. Each function has their goals and performance measures, each naturally optimizes what they do to achieve those goals. The senior executive team seeks to make sure the sum of each function’s performance enables the organization to achieve it’s goals. It’s a model that works pretty well. But then there’s the customer. The customer may first become aware of our companies through our marketing outreach. It may be […]
Getting Marketing And Sales Together
I commented on the results reported in IBM’s outstanding survey of CMO’s. The absence of concern about aligning and working with sales was alarming. It generated a lot of discussion an comments. My friend Bob Thompson at CustomerThink commented that absent anything else it would take 10-20 years for marketing and sales to get aligned. He suggested the only other alternative was a strong CEO, taking action to align the functions. I agree with Bob–perhaps I am more pessimistic. The wall that’s existed between sales and marketing probably dates back to the formation of the first sales and marketing departments. […]
Marketing And Sales–Inseparable
I just read the IBM 2011 Global CMO Marketing Study. It’s a fascinating report, based on in-depth interviews with more than 1700 CMO’s worldwide. It’s a must read for any sales and marketing professional. As I devoured the 72 page report, something struck me—where’s sales? In a discussion of critical issues facing CMO’s there was no discussion of the Sales Function or how Sales and Marketing need to work together. I wondered if I missed something, so I searched on the words “sales, sale.” Those words occurred 23 times in the 72 page report. Two times in the title of […]
Curiosity — A Critical Trait Of Great Sales People
A trait I don’t hear much about, but one that I think is critical for sales people is curiosity. When you are recruiting–do you look for curiosity? Think about it. We have to be students of our customers’ businesses–their customers, their markets, their competitors. We have to understand their business strategies, dreams, and goals. We have to look at our customers’ businesses, discovering new opportunities for improvement, looking at different ways to do things. We have to be curious about our customers as individuals–what drives them, what are they interested in, what are they trying to achieve, how do they […]
Follow-Up
Follow-Up, a simple concept, but one which too many managers fail to execute. Yet is is probably one of the most important elements of successful coaching. When we coach our people, one of the critical elements is establishing the next steps and actions to be taken. They may be tactical–about a deal, they may be improving the person’s capabilities or performance. We want to see progress and change. But it’s insufficient to drop it there, we need to follow up, both to see the outcome and to leverage the outcome to reinforce the coaching discussions. Coaching is an ongoing dialog, […]
Sometimes The Customer Just Needs To Decide!
I was reviewing a sales situation with a client earlier today. The sales person had done a fantastic job in managing the sales process. He had dealt with all the stakeholders, the competitors had presented their case, the advantages for my customer were compelling. Everyone was recommending my client’s solution. Everything was in the hands of the decision-maker—and it’s been that way for a month. The decision-maker just isn’t making a decision. We’ve looked at all the issues–the business case is very strong–so good that every week the decision is deferred, the customer continues to lose a lot of money—so […]