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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 Do Icebergs Have To Do With Selling?
Yeah, I know it’s a tired analogy, but icebergs are still useful in thinking about marketing and selling. We all know about icebergs, the part of the iceberg we see is dwarfed by the part of the iceberg that’s under the water and we don’t see. We face the same with our marketing and sales efforts. Our focus is on what we see–customers actively engaged in the buying process. And typically. we see them after they have been looking at make a change for some time. We all know the data–the customer is 57-90% through their buying process before they […]
What If Every Electronic Outreach Cost $.50?
In the “old days,” (about 20-30 years ago), my VP’s of marketing used to come to me for approval on major marketing campaigns. In those days, direct mail/direct marketing was still a primary communication channel. Marketing campaigns could be pretty expensive, there was design, printing, postage (they were always stamped because people opened stamped mail more then metered and trashed bulk mail). Getting/developing the right list was critical–it was harder to get good contacts/addresses, and because of the expense, marketing wanted to make sure they were targeting precisely the right people, not wasting mailings on people that weren’t in the […]
Are Our Customer Conversations Substantively Different Than Internal Discussions?
The other day, I published a post, “Are Traditional Selling Skills Even Relevant Anymore?” It’s generated a lot of great ideas and good discussion on both sides of the topic. One of the premises I had in the article is that the skills/challenges we face in driving change within our own organizations, and that those customers have within their organizations are not much different than the conversations/engagement that sales people and buyers have. They are human to human discussions, with all the same characteristics–disagreements, disinterest, differing points of view, alternative views on potential solutions, fear, confusion, confusion, convincing, negotiation, reaching […]
In Examining 27,357 Wins, 95% Of Sales People Did This One Thing!
Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of research, and collected our own data and analytics on what causes sales professionals to win. We’ve seen certain patterns emerge. Things like engaging the customer early in their process, ideally being the organization driving their thinking drives higher win rates. Other areas that one would expect is demonstrating superior value in both the solution and how we engage the customer in their buying process drive higher win rates. Giving customers new ideas, helping them improve their business drives both win rates and customer loyalty (derived from Gartner Research). But we’ve found one […]
“We Chose The Vendor With The Most Complete Solution”
I just read a report, “The Mood Of The B2B Buyer.” The results weren’t surprising, reinforcing most of the other research I see. There was one piece that provoked me to reflect. It was the response to the question, “In what circumstance might you opt for a more expensive solution to address a specific business need or pain point?” 53% of the respondents said, “If the vendor had a more complete solution.” It’s not at all surprising, but I can imagine thousands of marketers, sales enablement, and sales professionals salivating at that statement. I can just see how the majority […]
Are “Traditional” Selling Skills Even Relevant Anymore?
Categorize this post as “thinking out loud.” I’m not sure what I think about this issue, so I’m using the post to help me think through it and to get your input and ideas. We all know the story—buying has changed profoundly, complex buying is chaotic, we need to be customer focused/driven, we need to create value in every interaction….. At the same time, customers have many more sources/channels for information to help in their buying decisions, AI/ML technologies will make many transactional sales roles less necessary (tough this isn’t new news). And we have the convergence of information overwhelm, […]