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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
Discovery, A Product Pitch In Disguise!
Great discovery is foundational to understanding our customers and their needs. Too often, we skip it, instead rushing to pitch our products. When we do some nominal level of discovery, it’s actually a product pitch in disguise. Our questions aren’t oriented to understanding their needs or what they seek to change. Instead they steer the customer to express their needs in terms of the capabilities/features of our products. We ask, “Do you need this capability….. How do you manage this process…. Would it help if…… Do you need real-time dashboards….. Do you need seamless integration with….?” Our questions go through […]
How Customer Centricity Gets Lost In Our Metrics
As revenue operators, our job is to find and close customers. Whether it’s net new customers, retention/renewal, expansion. We measure our success based on hitting our revenue and profitability goals. Even when we claim to be customer centric, too often, we organize our GTM motions and measure our success in ways that make customers collateral damage, or worse, a means to our ends. We don’t start with the customer buying journey. We don’t start by helping them understanding and defining their problems. We cast everything in our terms and contexts. We organize the customer engagement strategy around our GTM process, […]
“Time To Customer Acumen…..”
Preface: This is long and very nerdy. But I think it’s important to share the details of this fascinating research project. We struggle with the idea of, “How do we develop better business acumen with our sellers? How much time, how much investment, when will we see the results? What this project shows is “Time to customer acumen is amazingly short–and simple!” Enjoy! Yeah, you know I’m a broken record on customer, problem, business, and financial acumen. I bore you with ideas and data showing how developing and implementing these skills is critical in driving our customer relationships and trust. […]
“Solve For” Vs. “Solve With,” The Real Role Of A Seller
Theoretically, we have solutions to our customers’ problems. Unfortunately, we tend not to focus on these, we tend to pitch the solutions, without knowing if the customer has the problem we solve, or really understanding that problem and what it means to them. We train our people to “solve the problem.” In their best engagements, we show up with insights, demonstrating, “here’s the solution to your problem, and if you buy by the end of the quarter we will offer you a discount….” The thinking underlying this approach is “We solve the problem for our customers!” The reality of the […]
Adapting To Today’s Realities, A Ruthless Pragmatist’s Guide
For the past several weeks, I’ve been writing some fairly esoteric/philosophical things. Talking about entanglement, durable revenue, rethinking value, and that value is in the friction. But most of you know me as a “ruthless pragmatist.” You are probably confused–and you should be. So I’m embarking on a series of articles, moving from philosophy to practice, theory to execution. My hope is to help you think about how you can take these abstract concepts and actually put them into practice. Let’s start with our GTM strategies. First, we need to stop pretending our GTM strategies are working they way they […]
Would Your Customers Notice?
All our customers are critical to our success. We strive to retain, renew, grow, and expand those we currently have. Every deal in our pipeline is important to us and our ability to achieve our goals. But what would happen if we were to disappear? In our current customers, what would happen if we disappeared? Would they just find a substitute product and move on with no impact? In our pipelines, what if we were to suddenly start ghosting our customers. We were in consideration, but just disappeared. Would they notice? Would they care? Or would the roll on, perhaps […]