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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
How Does Your Customer Make Money?
Can you answer the question, “How does you customer make money?” By that, I don’t mean at a superficial level, like, “Well, dugghh, Dave, they sell stuff……” I mean really understanding your customer’s business. It includes things like: Who are their customers/markets? What drives success with them? How are those markets growing?How does you customer position themselves with those customers, competitors, and in the markets? How do they hold the customer, how do they create value? Are they leaders and innovators, fast followers, middle of the pack, low price alternatives? What are their strategies and priorities in their markets? What […]
“Commander’s Intent,” Trust, And Sales Performance
In military history, there has long been the concept of “Commander’s Intent.” Great leaders recognized they could never anticipate and plan for everything that might happen in battle. Rather than giving orders that might try to dictate what to do in every possible situation, commander’s intent focuses on the outcomes they are trying to achieve in a certain operation. The goal behind this, and what makes it effective, is that it frees troops at lower levels to adapt and change what/how they execute, responding to the specific situation, but still focused on achieving the desired outcomes. There are a couple […]
False Choices: Transactional Versus Solution Selling Approaches
Often, I get into conversations about the sales approach a company deploys. There are questions of, “should we be transactional, product, solutions, consultative focused?” Often, particularly with XaaS companies, the executives leap to the conclusion, “We have to be transactional, “SaaS” focused. We want to drive predictable revenue through a high volume/velocity transactional approach.” That’s often because, “that’s what every other SaaS company does.” Others have a biased view based on what they perceive as the complexity and impact of their offerings, “We want to be a high value add partner and want a solutions based approach to selling.” Sadly, […]
Apples And Oranges
Let’s imagine that for some reason you want to evaluate the performance of apples. You might develop criteria and compare apples to those criteria. You might do a comparison, for example looking and apples and oranges. You’d immediately observe apples are relatively thin skinned fruit, at least relative to oranges. Possibly, every pound of oranges produces more juice than a pound of apples. When you bite into an apple you get that resounding crunch, biting into an orange you just get a squish. You’d observe it’s difficult to use oranges in making a pie. You could come up with a […]
Keys To Success In The New Year!
December is always ripe for prognostication and advice for success in the New Year. Pundits, consultant, vendors of Sales/Marketing automation tools will offer endless insight and advice on how to beat your goals, how to be successful, how to have a fast start for the New Year. Already, I’m seeing articles on, “Do these 5 things….. The 10 critical success factors….. These technologies are critical to customer engagement in 2020…” I’m no different, I’m jumping into the fray with the secrets to sales success in 2020. I’ve spent some time thinking about the keys to success, the secrets that will […]
FUD-Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt
FUD has been an element, unfortunately, of sales and selling probably since the very first transaction between Adam and Eve. It’s been a tactic many exploit in competitive situations, perhaps the thinking being creating FUD within the customer about the competitive vendor, or creating FUD around making a decision not in favor of us. Early in my career, there was a saying (I think more mythology), “No one ever got fired for making an IBM decision….” Hank Barnes recently addressed this with a terrific post, “Revisiting Thoughts On FUD (It’s Time For A New Approach).” It provoked my thoughts about […]