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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
Time, Our Scarcest Resource
We all know the single thing we cannot recover is time. Once it’s passed, we can never recover it. Most everything else, we do, we can recover from. We can change our strategy if things aren’t going right, we can find new customers if we don’t have enough deals to make our number, we can change our proposal if customers don’t like what we’ve proposed, we can change our jobs, if we accepted a role we end up not being well suited for. However, I’m always amazed with the casualness with which we treat our time. There are all sorts […]
The “Last Mile” In Selling
In the old days of telecom, the days when telecom was dominated by landlines, one of the most important strategies had to do with the “last mile.” (Actually, much of the conversation around net-neutrality is today’s version of the last mile.) The “last mile” was more figurative than literal, but it focused on who controlled the access to the home or business. Whatever service provider that owned that “last mile” relationship really controlled the majority of the revenue opportunity from the customer. There’s a similar concept in selling. As we look at many of our sale enablement strategies, it seems […]
Our Customers Are Doing Their Homework
Every three years, I go through the same cycle. My car lease comes to an end. Every three years, the same thing happens; about 6 months before the lease end, the dealer(s) start to contact me. It’s always with an offer, “We can let you out of the lease early and get you into the latest model of your current car…..” I’ve just gotten into that 6 month window. I’ve gotten two outreaches, the first from the dealer I bought the car from, the second from a deal where I happened to have the car serviced once. Both had the […]
Drowning In Information, But Where’s The Knowledge Or Insight
Those of you who know or follow me know I’m an information junkie. My Evernote file contains 15000 notes, all coded and tagged so I can put my fingers on any piece of information I want. Daily, I get feeds from all sorts of services, several provide me information and news on people and companies I’m following. Service like LinkedIn keep me updated with activity of people I’m following on LinkedIn, I have my special Twitter groups. I have a couple of services that provide me briefings on the people I’m meeting with through the day. This morning, it was […]
Does How You Sell(Market) Represent Your Company Well?
Customer experience is increasingly a key differentiator in acquiring and retaining customers. But, too often, we look at customer experience in a very narrow way, we think of it as their experience in using our products, after they have purchased them. The customer experience begins begins long before the first purchase a customer makes. Of course we know the reputation of our company, products, and solutions is important and influences them. But our marketing and sales prospecting approaches create are the very first direct impressions our prospects get of their potential experience with the company. For example, just today, I […]
“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 […]