Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Do Customers Really Want A Frictionless Buying Experience?
It seems to be fashionable to talk about creating “frictionless buying experiences?” I suppose the concept draws readers, perhaps it’s an extreme expression of removing barriers to the customer buying process. But does the concept make sense? Is it what customers want? And if we looked at the concept of “friction in the buying process, what is the greatest source of friction? Long time readers will recognize when I ponder questions like this, sometimes I revert back to my background in physics. If I look at an object in motion in a frictionless environment, they become impossible to stop. it […]
Nuance, So Subtle, We Often Miss It
Nuance is important to our ability to connect with impact to our customers and our people. Yet, too often, we miss it, or completely ignore it. Let’s start with what nuance is: 1 :a subtle distinction or variation “Nuances of flavor and fragrance cannot be described accurately …” —Scott Seegers “… these terms have certain nuances of meaning …” —Ben F. Nelms 2 :a subtle quality :nicety “… the nuances of an individual’s voice …” —Michael Swaine 3 :sensibility to, awareness of, or ability to express delicate shadings (as of meaning, feeling, or value) Too often, we design our engagement […]
Whatever Happened To MBWA?
Decades ago, Tom Peters and Bob Waterman articulated the concept of MBWA–Management By Wandering Around in their classic book, In Search Of EXCELLENCE (Caps mine–EXCELLENCE must always be in caps!) The principle is that leaders must get away from their desks, their cloistered offices, and meeting rooms. They must wander through their organizations, meet their customers and suppliers. The reason this was/is important is that it’s so easy to get out of touch with what’s going on. If we aren’t wandering around, we don’t have a good sense of what’s happening. We don’t know what people’s views are, we don’t […]
It’s Not About What Or How We Sell…..
How we define a problem inevitably constrains our solutions to the problem. That’s why it’s so important to think about the problem we are trying to solve and defining it in a way that enables us to solve the problem in a meaningful way. As we address the issue, “How do we drive sales, how do we grow our business, how do we achieve our numbers,” depending on how we frame the issues/problems around revenue growth, we could be seriously constraining the solutions that are available to solve the problem. Most organizations frame the issue around, “What we sell.” Inevitably, […]
How Are You Different?
I’m constantly amazed at the “sameness” of the majority of the prospecting I see. We inundate our prospects and customers with emails, social media outreaches, and phone calls that are virtually indistinguishable from those sent by everyone else. We blanket our prospects with one outreach after another. In most, we are pitching our products or our companies. We send the same, un-personalized emails, to 1000’s of targets. We follow them with calls, again focusing on our interests, not the customers.’ We set our email systems to automatically cycle follow ups, usually something as unique as, “did you see my original […]
We Claim To Be Data Driven, Yet We Ignore The Data
Recently, I heard someone say, “We claim to be data driven, yet we ignore the data.” Nothing could be more true of much of what I see in the practice of sales and marketing. We are surrounded by data about what drives sales and marketing effectiveness. Hundreds of market research reports, done by thoughtful researchers provide stunningly depressing news about sales and marketing performance. Performance data from within our own organizations highlights challenges. Despite, all this data, too many organizations seem committed to doing the things that don’t work. Yet doing them at an ever increasing cadence and intensity. I […]