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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 Question Is More Powerful Than A Statement!
There are few sales professionals that would argue with “A question is more powerful than a statement.” I’ve spent a lot of time at this blog, and there are hundreds of other articles on the power of great questions in sales. It helps us understand the customer, it helps them know that we are concerned about them and want to understand what they are trying to achieve. It aligns us and bonds us to the customer. It’s critical for our effectiveness as sales professionals. Until we understand what they need, what they are trying to achieve, we can’t agree on […]
Can You Make Your Annual Quota In 80 Days?
We’re all busy. We run from meeting to meeting, we’re busy doing research, reports, working on social media…. The list can go on. No one suffers from a lack of activity—the key to sales productivity, though, is are we focusing on the right activities? Ideally, as sales people, we want to spend as much of our time in customer/sales related activities as possible. Recently, I heard a piece of data, roughly 40% of sales people’s time is spent working with customers in sales related activities. Frankly I believe that probably high, I think the time is significantly less than that. […]
Does Our “Value” Align With How Customers Define Value?
Over the past week, I’ve been writing a lot about Value. We build our organizations around creating and delivering value. Yet, only the customer can define value. What we don’t recognize is the value we can create and deliver may not be aligned with value our customers need. Our jobs as sales professionals are to understand what customers value, align the value we can deliver with their value priorities, communicate our those superior and differentiated value elements, then deliver on it. We’re all familiar with “value propositions.” Our product and marketing people provide value propositions sales people can leverage in […]
Defining Value
After I published my post, Rethinking Value, an interesting discussion/debate ensued on Twitter. I followed it for a while, but then got lost in acronyms and some level of hyperbole. As much as I could track it, the discussion was interesting, but also indicative of some mistakes we make in thinking about value. Much of the discussion centered around, “how do we define value?” We cannot define value for our customers/markets. In fact, to think we can is the height of arrogance. We cannot impose what we value, or what we think they should value on our customers. Value can […]
The Sales Call
I’m at my desk, the phone rings, I answer, “Hello, this is Dave Brock.” At the other end of the line, in a pleasant voice, “Hi this is So and So. I’m an account manager at Such and Such Business Banking. I’m sure you have your banking needs covered, but…..” “Yes we do,” I answer, “thank you for calling, good bye.” As I hung up, I wondered, why would anyone ever plan a call this way? The probability of the same outcome as his call on me is probably 99.99%. But, based on his tone and wording, he was doing what […]
Rethinking Value
I’ve written a lot about value propositions, but I think we really need to rethink the concept of value. Not that value propositions are bad, but just the nature of the word “proposition” is limiting in terms of what’s important to customers. Too often, the concept of a value proposition is focused on an event or static moment. It may be that compelling statement we make to a prospect to get that first meeting. It may be those set of bullets on everyones’ web sites–usually headed by: Our Value Proposition–those generic phrases, that each competitor repeats resulting in no differentiation. […]