Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Customers, Looking For Help In Other Places
As sales people, our goal is to become the “go-to” resource for our customers in helping them solve their business problems. We want to position ourselves as trusted advisors to our customers. But customers aren’t responding, increasingly, they rely on other resources for help in solving their business problems. CSO Insight’s 2018 Buyer Preferences Survey show only 23% of buyers consider Vendor Sales People as one of the top three resources to help solve their business problems. Out of 10 resources alternatives (for example, subject matter experts, vendor websites, past experience, industry resources, peers, etc.), vendor sales people were ranked […]
Transforming What We Do Is Not Optional!
Last week, I was sitting in the Gartner Sales and Marketing Conference. If you’ve never attended, it’s one you need to put on your future agenda. Even if you aren’t a Challenger fan, it is probably one of the best learning experiences I can recommend. One of the panelists, Myke Hawkins of Kelly Services, made a statement that struck me, “We don’t have the luxury of not transforming what we do….” Suddenly I realized how unusual Myke’s perspective is. Too often, the executives I encounter (sales, marketing, and senior execs) are: Fat, dumb, happy, with what’s currently going on. Typically, […]
What Does “Insight” Mean In 2019 And Beyond?
The concept of providing our customers rich insight has become “standard” for complex B2B selling for at least the last 7 years. Some of us have been doing that all our careers-without knowing that we are providing insight. There are lots of definitions around what insight is, but most of them tend to be around concepts of “commercial insights.” These are generally stories and data around things happening in our customer’s industries and markets that may impact them. For example, improvements their competitors may be seeing through implementation of a solution or new approach to their businesses. They may be […]
Our Customers’ Stories
Storytelling is important. None of us live in a world of data and logic, as much as we might pretend that we do. Stories are important. Stories provide contexts to teach our customers and help them learn. They provide a basis for helping our customers understand how we might help them. They help customer learn through understanding the stories of people and organizations who have faced similar issues. Stories engage our customers hearts and minds. Unfortunately, when we think of stories, too often, we think of our stories or those we want to tell. But our customers have their own […]
The Challenged Customer
Our customers (and us) live in worlds characterized by information overload, rapidly changing circumstances, increasing demands, rising management expectations, scarcer resources, increasing scale, disruption, distraction, and complexity. It’s impossible to avoid feeling overwhelmed, unbalanced, and distracted. Getting things done, getting the support and resources to move forward is increasingly difficult. They must coordinate efforts across more people, they must get approvals and engage more people across the organization–sometimes extending outside the organization to partners, suppliers, customers. Increasingly, their days are driven by interruptions, they are always on–responding to emails or on calls 7/24. Risk, uncertainty, shifting priorities are the norm. […]
There Is No “Playbook” For Buying!
Playbooks are big. There are lots of tools and never ending content around playbooks for marketing and sales. Inevitably, these playbooks are intended to guide us through our marketing and sales processes–providing us relevant questions and content to move the customer through their buying process. Every playbook I’ve seen is very linear in its approach–start at the beginning of the customer buying process, then go sequentially Classically, we have always thought of buying as a linear process: Define a problem or opportunity to be addressed, identify needs/, goals, assess alternatives to meeting those needs/goals, make a decision, implement. We map […]