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
Rethinking Value
I was having a fascinating conversation with a good friend and client. We were talking about the challenges his people had in articulating value and differentiation. The products they sell had become highly commoditized. In the past, where there had been significant product based differentiation, over time, with more competition and market changes, everty thing changed. Today, there is virtually no differentiation between products offered by his company and those offered by the competition. All had pretty much the same specifications, features, functions. (We see this in virtually every product. For example PCs, CRM, ERP (at least the traditional major […]
Skating To Where The Puck Was!
There’s the famous Wayne Gretzky quote, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” If you read the current literature and blog posts on the future of selling, everything is about it being virtual, or in the least, hybrid. Guru’s and sales execs alike are talking and investing in tools that allow sales people to engage over virtual platforms like Teams, Zoom, and others. Sales execs talk about how they are reducing travel budgets, because sales people can engage customers virtually, reducing or even eliminating the need for F2F. They love the productivity […]
Stop The Madness
Long time readers will know that every once in a while I need to vent and express my frustration with some of the mindless things we see people doing in sales and marketing. This is one of those posts. Yes, I’ll whine, yes, many of you get the same things inflicted on you, and maybe we can let off a little steam and chuckle. And, inevitably, I will alienate a huge segment in the sales/marketing world. In this case, it’s PR Agents and Media Consultants. I always dive into this with some level of concern, I do know a small […]
The Problem With “Discovery”
For decades, sales people have been taught about the importance of “Discovery.” It’s a series of questions we inflict on the customer. We use it, both to qualify opportunities, and to understand how to position our solutions to win. We learn how to ask a series of questions to understand their needs, to understand who will be involved in the buying decision, to understand their budgets, to understand their decision criteria and timeframe. The thinking behind the discovery process is that once the customer gives us all those answers, we can then undertake a series of activities to position our […]
The New Sales Channel
Channels “partners” have been a part of sales ever since sales have existed. Channels are a high impact route to market, they enable us to connect with customers we can’t easily connect with. They provide capabilities, amplifying our offerings, enabling our channel partners and us to create greater value to the customer. They may provided deeper expertise in certain areas than we can, consequently, driving higher levels of success. We put in place programs to attract channel partners (or if we are a channel, to attract the companies developing the products/solutions) getting them to sell our products. We train them, […]
Automation And Ineptness
Automation and technology, properly implemented can do tremendous things to augment our capabilities. It can make us more productive. It can enable us to be more efficient. It can give us deeper knowledge and insight into the people we seek to engage. It’s hard to imagine not leveraging technology to help improve our ability to connect and create real impact with our prospects and customers. At the same time, like virtually everything, automation can be horribly dangerous. It enables us to create crap at the speed of light. It enables us to demonstrate our ineptness, lack of caring, absence of […]