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
Improv In Selling
Readers might be a little surprised about the concept of Improv In Selling. Some would reflect on how overly scripted sales conversations are. We are trained to follow the script, not deviating, even if that’s not what the customer cares about. Others would laugh at the concept of improv, saying that sales people are always winging it, shooting from the lip. They would excuse this, suggesting, “we’ve been involved in 100s to 1000s of calls, we can handle everything.” And, usually, they fail. Some would be somewhere in between, suggesting we have to follow the process and never deviate. So […]
Rethinking Insights
Everything in selling today is about “Insight.” But we make insights more complicated than they need be. We tend to think that insights are game changing things we can tell customers. Whether it’s industry/market data, things that are happening in the industry, observations about what is happening with their customers or competitors; we believe we need to make a statement or take a position. While these are useful if we have that information, insights can be much simpler. And insights can be much more personal and relevant than an industry disruption. The purpose of insight is to provoke the customer […]
The “Problem” Is Different Depending On Where You Sit
Imagine a customer with a problem. But that problem, is very different depending on where you sit. Let’s imagine an IT technology challenge, though we can apply this thinking to just about any problem. IT views the problem in a certain way. It sees the challenges in a certain way, the value of solving the problem in a certain way, the risks in choosing and implementing a solution, and the importance of addressing the problem in a certain way. The end users, for the purposes of this discussion, let’s look at customer service, will see the problem in a different […]
A Plethora Of Data
As a bit of a preface, I’m a tremendous fan of the artwork of Theodor Geisel, more commonly known as Dr. Seuss. Over the years, I’ve acquired a number of his pieces. One of my favorites is “A Plethora of Cats.” Readers of the blog, also, know that I’m a huge fan of data. A sales people and leaders, we are fortunate to have more data than we have ever had access to in the past–and some of it is actually useful and informative. We have a Plethora Of Data…… Despite the increasing availability of data, I usually find we […]
Getting Commitments….
All of us, as we develop as sales professionals, learn that we need to seek commitments from the customer. The commitments are, often, small. A commitment for a next meeting, a commitment to provide information, a commitment to check references, a commitment for a demo, a commitment for….. These commitments help keep us engaged with the customer and, hopefully, they with us. And, as we have been taught, the more commitments the customer makes with us, the better positioned we feel we might be. We also tend to think of commitments as progress–progress in developing the relationship, progress through the […]
Being Interesting Or Interested?
Spoiler alert, we really seek to be both interested and interesting, and we hope our prospects/customers are both interested and interesting. However, to maximize the opportunity for this to occur, there is important sequencing of this process. As sellers, we do everything we can to be interesting. We leverage provocative insights, we develop pitches we think are interesting/even compelling. We learn all sorts of “opening” techniques to be interesting in our calls. We spend endless hours constructing subject lines and first sentences in emails, all in the hopes of being interesting. Or worse, we blindly take what marketing or someone […]