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
Are We Creating The Value Our Customers Value?
Selling is about creating value…. Well, yeah, … but we have differing views of value, which often focuses on us and not the value customers need…. To most sellers, it’s fitting the customer’s budget and winning because we might have a few more features than the alternatives, or are cheaper. The customer is very knowledgeable, they know what they need and want, our goal is to get them to choose us. To some, it’s creating a business case that meets the customer goals. We may demonstrate the ROI or some other business case, focusing on justifying the purchase of our […]
When The Going Gets Tough
For the past several years, news gets tougher and tougher. First the pandemic, we and our customers had to discover new ways of working, engaging and moving forward. “Virtual” became the watchword for how things got done–whether it involved internal collaboration, partners, or customer engagement. Just as we started to learn how to manage in the pandemic, we start seeing supply chain challenges. Lead times became very long, the ability to satisfy our customers’ needs were challenged. We found we could get the order, but delivering it became more challenging–or when customers found we couldn’t deliver, they’d choose to do […]
On Performance Planning…..
Performance planning is one of the most powerful tools for managers and their people. Yet, too often, I don’t see organizations fully exploit the power of performance plans and the performance planning/management process. Too often, we view this process as “something HR makes us do.” As a result, we take whatever template HR provides, fill in a few blanks, like quota, comp, etc, then send it to the person. Each person has basically the same performance plan, each person files it away, ignoring it until the performance review. Sometimes, we also view performance plans in a “punitive” manner. “If you […]
“Customers Only Spend 5% Of Their Time With Sellers!”
I read a post from a “thought leader.” If focused on how profoundly selling is changing—Wow, I’ve never heard that before. It focused on buyers spending less time with sales people, quoting a Gartner survey, suggesting they get their information from other sources. It concluded that we have to change, that we had to figure more/different ways to engage customers getting more of their mindshare. All the points are true–sort of. Gartner, has published post using the 5% figure as an eye grabbing lead. But you have to dive into the research to understand it The research actually shows, buying […]
Sales Conversations?
Everyday I read articles about how to conduct sales conversations. They get into topics like, “do you start with ‘How are you…,’” They extend into the exact sentence structure, use these words, don’t use these, counter with this, use these pattern interrupts, here are the sequences. There is discussion about authenticity, which often seems to be faux authenticity; sometimes accompanied by recommendations on mirroring, facial expressions, and so forth. The tricks, gimmicks, and techniques around this specialized segment of “conversations,” seems to go on and on and on…… We even have tools that are supposed to guide us on having […]
Is There A Selling Career Path?
Recently, I had a fascinating conversation with a client. We talked about something I rarely hear managers discussing, and something I don’t see pundits commenting on. The topic was, “What kind of career path options do we want to develop for our people? How do we challenge and retain our people longer? How can we enable them to contribute at higher levels?” It’s remarkable because it flies in the face of “conventional wisdom practice” in business. It seems that selling jobs, at all levels, are viewed as “temp” jobs. It’s an interesting phenomena, retention is not an “A” priority for […]