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
What If We Started With A Blank Sheet Of Paper?
Buying is changing profoundly. This impacts everything we do to try to engage our customers, creating value through their buying and usage journey. To effectively engage our prospects and customer, we have to rethink all our strategies and approaches in working with them. Somehow, our engagement strategies are less and less effective. Marketing (and sales) inundate customers and prospects with endless emails, texts, phone calls. The majority of these go into “spam buckets.” Customers increasingly choose to minimize sales involvement in their buying process, seeking digital and other sources to support their buying journeys. Social channels are increasingly cluttered and […]
“How Are We Doing….”
We’re all used to the email surveys, usually following some shopping or customer service experience. “Tell us how we did…” They ask a series of questions asking us to relate our experience. Inevitably, one of the questions is the ever present NPS question, “Would you recommend us to someone else.” Usually, these survey’s come after we have completed something, we’ve bought something, we asked for some sort of customer service. Whatever the case, the survey is about something that has happened, but now is over. Perhaps, organizationally, we assess the results from a collection of surveys, theoretically using the results […]
How Value And Value Creation Evolves
It’s imperative that we continue to evolve our thinking on value and value creation. Way back, in the old days, we created value for our customers by educating them about new products and solutions. The way customers learned about new things and how they might solve problems or addressed new opportunities was largely interactions with sales people. The value we created was educating them about products and services. Sales people used to be the primary source of information and learning, offering customers a view of what was going on both in and outside their companies. Customers didn’t have the web […]
How Are You Helping Others Achieve Success?
We are focused on our own success. Striving for success is key to how we grow, learn, develop and learn. Sometimes we fail. But our failures are important to our success. They help us learn, change, improve. As human beings we are driven to achieve. There’s a funny thing about success, we can’t be successful on our own. We are reliant on others in order to achieve success. It turns out we can’t be successful if those we work with aren’t successful. If our customers fail in their buying efforts, if our customers don’t achieve their goals, we don’t get […]
“How Would You Rate Your Recent Call Experience With Irene M?”
It’s become de-rigueur, after a call to a customer support center, an email is sent asking for an evaluation of the agent. Yesterday, I was having trouble getting something done with my bank. I struggled for a few minutes with some bot, before disconnecting. I searched the web site for about 40 minutes. I struggled for a few minutes with some bot, before disconnecting. I even googled the issue. I tried the app on my phone. Finally, I decided that I needed to talk to a human being. I searched the website for another 5 minutes trying to find the […]
Rethinking Qualification
Qualification is, perhaps, one of the most important factors to our sales success. If we chase the wrong deals, if the opportunity is an “opportunity” only in our dreams and there is little customer commitment to change, if we can’t be competitive–we waste our time and our customers.’ Sadly, most sales people do a terrible job at qualifying. As a result pipeline quality plummets, win rates plummet. And that starts the vicious cycle of finding more deals to build our pipeline, which we continue to fill with junk, and we don’t produce results. Qualification is important to all sellers. We […]