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
“But That’s More Than We Planned To Pay!”
Too often, we get to the end of a buying cycle and pricing becomes the issue. The deal stalls, the customer may discuss a competitor’s lower price, they are looking for concessions. The “D” word–discount–dominates the discussion. Price will always be an issue, but it becomes the winning/losing issue when we fail to establish a strong based of differentiated value, and because we have failed to focus the customer on the goals they are trying to achieve. Early in their buying process, we have to help the customer understand and quantify the consequences of doing nothing. We have to continue […]
Speak With An End In Mind–A Guest Post From Diego Segura
With the advent of fancy algorithms and analytics, online content is as curated and relevant to the individual as it’s ever been. Hop on Twitter at any given moment and you’ll be met with sports highlights, news bits, and 6 second videos of (arguably) funny people. Spend a couple weeks on the platform, and Twitter will begin to figure out that you’re more of a sports guy, and that you can’t help but click on a couple cute cat videos every once in a while. Using this information, the platform becomes more enjoyable for you to use over time as […]
It’s Harder To Sell Within Our Own Companies!
Tibor Shanto posed an interesting situation in a LinkedIn discussion: Got an interesting question or scenario for people who work with sales managers, presented by an experienced sales manager and her new company. She was invited to join the company because of her track record in the industry. They wanted her to establish a similar team and process to the one she had implemented at her previous company and told her she had Carte Blanche. It turns out there was a silent asterisk: “Do whatever you want, just don’t change anything other than the results. What’s her best move four […]
If You Don’t Know Who Your Customer Is, Improving Selling Skills Won’t Help
Over the past few days, I’ve been participating in a discussion about a struggling organization. It’s a start up, the CEO wanted help in developing sales skills. But as the discussion progressed, it was clear the CEO didn’t understand who their customers were. They were responding to queries from whoever happened to find their web site. They also didn’t understand why their customers were buying, in fact it wasn’t clear that they understood what problems they were solving for the customer–their win rate was 1.7%. Yet the CEO and many participants in the discussion were convince, all they needed to […]
Playing Sales Enablement “Catch-Up”
This week, I had meetings with a number of sales enablement professionals. Each came from very large companies with strong commitments to sales enablement. Each had long experience and sales enablement programs that would be considered “best in class.” In each conversation, they were struggling with similar issues, “How to keep up with the demand for help/support.” They had long list of things they needed to put in place. Different training, new content, new tools. They faced issues of which to prioritize, how to get the work done, how to implement without overwhelming the sales teams, how to manage the […]
Connecting The Dots
At executive levels, we are fond of developing new strategies and priorities for the business. We spend countless hours in developing strategies to change our business, to drive growth, to expand into new segments, to change the value we create for our customers, becoming much more important to them. At some point we start rolling out our strategies—we talk to analysts, proudly talking about the new strategies/directions and how they will drive growth. We reposition ourselves in the markets through a variety of communications within the markets, to our customers, and others in the ecosystem. We develop change initiatives, new […]