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
Is The Problem You Solve The Problem The Customers Have?
Recently, I’ve been having a number of fascinating conversations with sellers on “the problem to be solved.” I’ve been asking them, “What problem do you solve?” The responses usually focus on what their products/solutions do. They aren’t feature discussions (which is great), rather they describe things like, “we improve data accuracy, integrity, and quality.” Or “we reduce time on administrative tasks,” or any number of things. While these are “problems,” what we are really describing is what our offerings do, and not centering on the problems the customer cares about. While data accuracy and time spent on administrative tasks are […]
“Getting Out Of The Building……”
Steve Blank has a concept he calls, “Getting out of the building.” Tom Peters has written about a similar concept, MBWA–Management By Walking Around. These are similar approaches focused on how we really get to know and understand our customers, it’s seeing them in their “natural habitats.” Much of my career has been built on this principle, whether it is wandering around customer facilities, or the organizations I led. There was always something different about wandering the halls and offices of my customers and people. Doing this enabled me to see how they really work. I saw how they engaged […]
Tilting The Numbers In Our Favor, In Praise Of Lazy Sellers
We have metrics for virtually anything in selling. We have endless performance metrics, activity measures, pipeline/forecast, deal, prospecting, account retention, growth and other metrics. We have marketing and customer experience metrics. It seems we want to and can measure almost anything in selling, but we struggle with how to use them. As an example, every year, I must review over 1000 pipelines. They are rarely healthy. When I ask sellers what they are doing to fix their pipelines, the universal answer is, “We have to fill the pipeline, we need our people to do more prospecting!” That is a fine […]
“Quid Pro Quo And Caring”
Charlie Green wrote a stunning post, “Relationships Are Everything” Some of the ensuing discussion, both in the comments on the post and Charlie and my private notes to each other focused on the transactional nature of so much of what we do. “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.” Quid pro quo is sometimes mistaken as a form of caring. In Charlie’s post he describes a situation where one of his colleagues demonstrated enormous empathy and caring for a troubled client. And while the situation passed, that client provided Charlie’s colleague with millions of dollars of business. One could […]
Surrendering To AI…..
Every day, we see exciting new applications of AI. We all know the power of AI in helping take over administrative tasks, helping research customers, prospects, taking the tedium out of developing content or drafting emails. These tasks, which take so much of our time, and that, often, do poorly can now be done by AI. And we see daily announcements of new capabilities and uses of AI. Recently, there’s been some excitement about AI tools monitoring our desktops and devices. Based on what it detects us doing, it organizes potential next tasks. It may see that I’m writing a […]
“The Illusion Of Service”
I was at one of my favorite restaurants. I’ve become somewhat of a regular, they seated me at my normal table, my favorite server was waiting on me. But something was really off that evening. The restaurant wasn’t that full, the wait staff were busy, but service was really slow. My server is normally on top of things, but she was struggling. When she brought my glass of wine, she apologized. “Dave, I’m so sorry, things are screwed up today, unfortunately, we are ‘Giving the Illusion of Service….’” It struck me, that’s what so many are giving these days. They […]