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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
Effectiveness Must Precede Efficiency
Too often, we seem to focused on volume, velocity and activity levels, thinking that the more things we do, the better we are. We set goals for number of prospecting calls, numbers of meetings, and any number of things. The thinking is, if we simply do more, we produce more. On face value, that makes sense. Having 20 prospecting conversations a week is twice as good as having 10 prospecting conversations a week (assuming all else is equal). Chris Beall, of Connect and Sell is gracious in publishing data in this area. The data provides really interesting insights and questions […]
Value Creation, Are Your Customers Holding Up Their End?
I wrote, The Arrogance Of Creating Value For The Customer. Most of the time when sales and marketing people speak about value, we think of what we “inflict” on the customer. We tell them our value propositions, then letting them figure out whether it means anything to them. Perhaps we take the time to understand what they value, then presenting our value in the context of what they value. In the article, I suggested that value creation is really a collaborative effort, a journey we and the customer embark on, creating value together. It’s a journey of learning, discovery, challenging […]
Leading With The Problem?
I was involved in a twitter discussion. The following question was posed, “When cold calling, to you lead with the Problem?” There were all sorts of responses–naturally, some say “lead with insights,” others lead with the problem. It’s not an easy question, and there is no right answer. I reflected for a few moments, actually, I went through my prospecting calls for the past two weeks. I’m not sure it was conscious, but I found that I had been leading these calls with the Opportunity. That is, I initiated the discussion focusing on an Opportunity for the prospect to achieve, […]
Understanding Your Customer’s Needs And Requirements
In my formative years in selling, one of the key things I learned was to understand my customer’s needs and requirements as early as possible. In virtually every sales methodology and process, there is some “discovery stage.” Typically, in that stage, our goal is to understand the customer’s needs, goals, requirements. We do this to understand how to present our solution, demonstrating we meet their needs and so forth. There’s a huge challenge with this–consequently a huge opportunity. By the time a customer is able to articulate their needs, priorities, and requirements, they are pretty advanced in their buying cycle. […]
The Arrogance Of “Creating Value For The Customer”
We, and I, are sloppy in our language, at times, particularly when we speak of value and value creation. We tend to think of value in a one sided way, as something we “bestow” on the customer. At it’s worse, value is something we determine in our companies–we position it as our value propositions, embed it in our “features/advantages/benefits.” The laziest in our profession don’t even seek to understand what customers value, instead presenting what we’ve determined as value, letting customers figure out whether it applies to them or not. At it’s best, which actually is very good, we understand […]
Cold Calling, Alive And Kicking!
Cold calling is alive—at least when you look at the number of posts proclaiming its death. Also, judging by the number of “cold calls” I get every day. It’s unfortunate that a discussion about cold calling has to start with definitions and semantic disclaimers. Unfortunately, the most of the discussion are based on whatever definition or stereotypes one chooses. Usually, the definition and subsequent discussion is based on supporting whatever it is the author is trying to sell. Whatever the reason, we can’t have meaningful discussions about cold calling without a common framework of what cold calling is. Social selling, […]