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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
Needs Vs Wants
We’re taught, and I have taught about the importance of “Need Identification.” We sophisticated discovery questions focused on probing customer needs, understanding their requirements. When we are at our best, we deeply understand the customer business processes. We understand the challenges/problems they face. We understand the impact of those problems. We understand the consequences for doing nothing. And we work with our customers to help them understand these things. We do analysis, we provide assessments, analyses, business cases, justifications. These are accompanied by testimonials and case studies about how we help our customers address their needs. We equip our customers […]
Cat Insurance…..
Long time readers will know that I sometimes choose a topic that’s not the “real topic.” It’s often a way for us to think about far deeper issues. For example, while I talk a lot about “relationship selling,” and the importance of human to human connection in selling and business, I’m also making a commentary on society, in general. When I talk about our eroding expectations, it’s not just on the customer service we have come to expect, but it’s also about the expectations we have of each other in the workplace, with our customers, in our communities, and societies. […]
“Relationship” Selling…..
I was listening to a webcast recently and the “new” concept of “Relationship” selling came up. Apparently the speakers were noticing the fact that to develop trust and confidence with our customers, we have to build some sort of relationship. The discussion went further, discussing concepts around FOFU, sensemaking, decision confidence, all requiring some level of relationship in helping the customer understand and move forward. It’s fascinating that after more than a decade of mechanizing our engagement strategies, we are now discovering that, ultimately, selling is all about people working with people. Whether it’s within the buying team itself, our […]
“Don’t Cancel” Vs. “Buy Again”
We know retention is critical to every business strategy. Somehow, the SaaS crowd thinks they’ve invented the concept, but the reality is that it’s been a business fundamental since the foundation of business. Dig into any earnings report of any organization in the world. Look at the portion of revenue from net new logos versus current customers buying again. Early stage companies will be biased to net new logos, but as they mature, the balance of revenue shifts to current customers. It becomes critical to get customers retain customers, for them to continue to buy or to buy again. Along […]
Deal Slippage
Deal slippage is a huge issue for all sellers, but also for buyers. Let’s dive into what drives deal slippage. Most deal slippage is not really deal slippage. Let me call it “faux slippage.” This slippage has nothing to do with the buyer, their sense of urgency, or when they need to have a solution in place. Faux slippages is a result of seller error. It occurs for any number of reasons, including: We act as though target close dates are important, but we don’t tend to focus on the importance and the basis for selecting a certain date. One […]
“This Is What We Do…..”
So many of our prospecting and initial conversations start with a variant of “This is what we do….” It may be phrased as a question, “Do you need solutions that help you do these things….?” Or it may be more directly tied to our products, “Our product will help you achieve this….” However we phrase it, from the outset of the conversation, we are focusing the attention on us, our company, and our products. And our prospects and customers don’t care! It’s this focus on what we do and not what the customer cares about that impacts our ability to […]