Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Table Stakes Are Changing — How Do We Up The Ante?
I just finished a conversation with a client. He is the EVP of Sales for a high performing sales organization. We were talking about the challenge of setting his company’s offerings apart from the competition—continuing to differentiate their solutions.For a few moments, we spoke about the “good old days.” We reflected on how things had changed, what used to set them apart is now a common expectation—all the competitors deliver the same capability or experience, the customers now have new expectations — the table stakes have changed!Table stakes are constantly changing, the ante is continually increasing. If we aren’t changing–in […]
Sales Is Changing, Are You Maximizing Your Impact?
Webinar: Driving Demand in a Demanding Market July 15 11 AM PST / 2 PM ESTAs a sales executive, you know how difficult it is to increase revenue while decreasing costs in today’s selling environment. You’re under pressure to produce sales. Missed deals are costing you money. You need new ways to get smarter and more productive quickly – not more of the same. But which new sales strategies will help you uncover hidden demand and maximize revenue potential without breaking the bank?Tune in to our live webcast to hear a panel of experts discuss strategies on how to boost […]
Delivering Value Through Channel Partners
To many sales and business executives, developing channels, reseller relationships, or other similar partnerships is driven by finding cost effective means to covering markets or geographies. While this is compelling, I’d like to suggest a more effective strategy for developing and implementing your channel and partner strategies—if well executed, it will also be a cost effective way of reaching your customers. Partners can be a key differentiator in developing, communicating, and delivering value to your customers. Today, no organization can deliver everything the customers need. Partners and resellers can be effective in adding to your total value proposition, better addressing […]
People Don’t Like To Be Sold—But They Do Like To Buy!
This is the quandary of the traditional sales person—they sell, but we all know people don’t like to be sold! What we forget about this concept is that while people don’t like to be sold, they really do like buying! I’ll say it again–people like to buy. People need to buy to achieve their goals. A problem is that people don’t necessarily know how to buy! Solving this problem for customers is the real opportunity for sales professionals, it’s the opportunity for sales to add value to the customer’s buying process. The role of the sales professional is to facilitate […]
Creating Value—Business And Personal
I’ve been writing about creating differentiated value for your customers. Let me focus on a couple of elements of value—in this you will discover why “generic” value propositions miss the mark. Value has many dimensions. As business and sales professionals, we tend to focus on the business elements of value–how much we can reduce costs, how much we can improve revenues, how much we can improve quality, and so forth. Business value, particularly when quantified is critical in sales. There is another dimension of value that we often miss, but which can be the most important and differentiating element of […]
Setting Yourself Apart, Developing and Communicating Differentiated Value
A compelling and differentiated value proposition is critical in selling—we all know this, yet this remains one of the biggest challenges facing sales professionals. This post examines 5 critical elements about developing and communicating differentiated value propositions. 1. Numbers count, quantifying your value is critical. We know the structure of value proposition, it states a problem area or issue your customer has, addresses what you can do about it, and ideally provides quantification of the result. For example, in working with sales executives, I often say: “We can reduce the number of calls your people have to make on each […]