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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
Value Realization, Value Positioning, Value Creation
As sales and marketing people, the concept of “Value Proposition” has become fundamental in our positioning in our markets and with our customers. The concept of the value proposition can be traced back, apparently, to a McKinsey paper written in 1988, and to Norton and Kaplan’s work in the early 90’s (I was surprised by this, I thought the concept predated this by some years.) But value propositions have become almost another feature we talk about in pitching our products and company. Take a moment, search your website and those of your competition. Inevitably you will find the “value proposition” […]
“How Will This Initiative Be ‘Gamed'”
I spend my time with clients thinking about and implementing major change initiatives. We pour over data, have workshops on what we need to do, how to do it, risks, metrics, implementation plans. Ultimately, we come up with a launch program. At that point, I stick a monkey wrench into the process, sometimes frustrating the client who wants to move forward. I ask two questions: “What’s in it for the people we are inflicting this change on?” (Usually, it’s the sales people.) “How are they going to ‘game’ this?” Often, the responses are something like, “They need to do these […]
Value Is A Mystery…..
Our websites are filled with content about our ‘unique value propositions,” which inevitably turn out to be not that unique. We constantly declare our value in every conversation we have with customers, positioning it around the superiority of our products and services. We tend to declare value, without proof and without knowing if it’s what the customer really values. The reality, value is a mystery. As sales people, it’s our job to unravel that mystery. We have to do the detective work. There are at least two dimensions to the concept of “value is a mystery.” The most obvious is […]
Creating Places Where People Want To Work
A new word/concept is creeping into my vocabulary, “The Great Resignation.” I have to confess, I’m not seeing much of this in my clients–at least yet. Some are beginning to talk about it. Many friends and colleagues seem to be seeing indications of the great resignation. The headlines focus on exhaustion and burnout, much driven by the hybrid work environment, WFH and other factors. The pandemic may have been a forcing function accelerating the great resignation, but we’ve seen signs of it for perhaps the last decade. So we shouldn’t be surprised. And we created it! Survey after survey, for […]
On Qualifying!
Qualifying our prospects/customers is critical for sales people. We want to make sure we are pursuing the right opportunity, that the customer has a compelling need to change, and that they are serious in considering our solutions/services. Sadly, too many sales people do a poor job of qualifying, chasing deals that both waste customer and our time. But there’s another aspect to qualifying that we don’t talk much about. It’s the customer qualifying us. Naturally, they want to make sure our solutions will fulfill their requirements. But they are looking much more deeply than the capabilities of our products/services. Do […]
“Selling Internally,” Driving Transformation
We tend to think differently about our behaviors in engaging customers and “selling,” and how we drive change–particularly big change–within our own organizations. But in reality, the issues, challenges, and processes are very similar. We can learn a lot about driving internal change from the very best practices in helping our customers change/buy. But let’s start with some data: An older McKinsey study shows over 70% of internal transformation efforts fail. Mort Hansen’s work in Collaboration shows similar data on internal projects. From the Challenger/Gartner research, we find 54% of committed buying efforts fail–they end in no decision made. My […]