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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
Don’t Let Your Customer Buy Because Of What Your Product Costs!
We set ourselves up for failure, we set our customers up for failure when we focus on the price–even the costs of our products and services. Sadly, most selling and much buying focuses on the wrong thing, “What’s the price?” We train our customers to focus on price, by the way we sell. Early in their buying process, we bring up our price, “We are cheaper than the competition….” “We are willing to discount….” “If you buy by the end of the quarter….” As a result of the way we sell, we’ve changed the way customer buy. We’ve shifted their […]
Is Your Customer Prepared For This Meeting?
We are all busy. Whether it’s going from call to call, virtual meeting to virtual meeting, or just getting things done; we never seem to have enough time. Inevitably, things slip, delay, priorities change—not because they need to change, but people’s attention is diverted to something else. Dealing with the reality of people being too busy and constantly shifting focus, requires us to do things differently, to engage our customers differently. First, we have to make sure we are using their time well. Second, that in every interchange we help them move forward in accomplishing their goals. What if we […]
“Free” Is Meaningless If The Customer Doesn’t Care!
Someone has been prospecting me. I’ll own up to it–normally I ignore 95% of the prospecting attempts people make. Most is poorly researched, irrelevant, and poorly executed. Spending any time–even responding is a waste of my time. But some prospecting attempts standout as being perhaps being a little better than mediocre (It’s a shame I had to set the bar so low). The prospecting note was reasonably relevant–at least it was relevant to my industry, markets, and so forth. But it focused on an issue that does not impact my organization. While others in our industry might have this problem, […]
Reveling In Complexity
As we look at complex B2B enterprise level solutions, without a doubt, they are complex. When a customer talks to us about our solutions, we can always solve their problems, but as we look at proposing a solution we pummel the customer with endless questions, “How many people will need this, what are the other systems/processes we must interface with, how should we customize the solution to your specific needs, what are the average loads/utilization, what are the peak loads,…..” Then there are the implementation issues, “We need to do this, then this, but of course you might do that, […]
“This Is What Your Competitors Are Doing”
Every day, I get a sales pitch through some channel. Often, the theme is something along the lines, “Your competition is doing these things (or using our product), we’d like to show you how you can do the same thing they are doing.” Alternatively, I talk to “sales strategists.” They assess the competition with the idea of copying what they are doing. Particularly those competitors that are perceived as market leaders. I suppose the thinking is, “If we do more thing like them, we will win more business.” Both these arguments are so flawed. We don’t win business because we […]
Are You Using “Sales GPS?”
For years, we’ve become accustomed to using GPS to help us get to where we are going. I have GPS in my cars, on my bike, and on my IPhone. I used to use it only for destinations I had never been to before. Now, particularly on longer or complicated trips, I use it, even though I know the direction. The GPS helps me with traffic, road construction, or anything that may have changed since my last trip. It’s useful to think of buying and sales GPSs. Consider it from a buyer’s point of view. They are probably considering something […]