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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
What Sales Can Learn From Lean Manufacturing — Part 2
As I mentioned in my prior post, there are a lot of people promoting the application of Lean Manufacturing principles in sales. There is a lot we can learn, at the same time, there are huge areas where the comparisons break down. If you haven’t read the first post, What We Can Learn From Lean Manufacturing, be sure to read this. This post continues on the foundation of Toyota Production System’s 4 P’s, by diving into the 14 principles. Recapping them briefly: Philosophy as the foundation: Principle 1: Base your management decisions on a long term philosophy, even at the […]
“How To Get Customers Come To You….”
I just read a very good post by a famous marketing “guru.” It was entitled ” How to get customers to come to you…” It’s marketing and sales people’s dreams, getting customers to come to us. Something we’ve done has interested them. Something has provoked them to ask for more. They may not be ready to buy, but it could be the starting point of a relationship. Customers coming to us makes everything easier. They usually may want to learn more, so we get to talk about our favorite things—our products, our company, ourselves. There are many in marketing and […]
Are You Doing The Work Your Customers Care About?
Anthony Iannarino wrote a post, Why C Level Executives Should Take More Meetings With Sales People. Usually, Anthony and I are so aligned in our thinking, we tend to complete each other’s sentences (which makes for odd conversations). While I get Anthony’s point in the post, there’s an unfortunate reality. Most of the time, sales people waste the executive’s time. Survey data shows customer complaints: They don’t understand my business. They don’t talk about what I want to talk about. They don’t know their products (even though that’s what they want to talk about). …….., They waste my time. […]
What Sales Can Learn From Lean Manufacturing
There a number of people with views that sales can learn a lot from manufacturing and applying lean and agile manufacturing methods to the sales function. I tend to agree, a lot of the underpinnings of great manufacturing have great applicability to selling. At the same time, there are some real limitations, which we can’t be naive about in applying manufacturing techniques where they don’t fit (Read my “Customers Are Not Widgets,” and related posts. Perhaps the foundation for much of today’s modern manufacturing thinking is the Toyota Production System. It was Toyota’s approach to manufacturing developed over decades under […]
How Does Your Customer Make Money?
Recently, I was in a discussion with a group of sales people. I posed the question, “How does your customer make money?” Most of them responded with what their customers did, for example: “They’re a SaaS company, they manufacture products for this market, they are a services provider……” They knew some basics about the customers, their products, and so forth, but they struggled to get to any detail about how their customers made money. I asked them, “What is your customer’s business model,” which is a more obscure way of asking how they make money. Most of the people in […]
Hunters And Farmers…….Again
There’s a round of discussions going on about Hunters and Farmers. Underlying these discussions are attitudes, “Real sales people eat fresh meat every day” (The hunter camp), “We need to develop our accounts to maximize LCV” (Farmers). I even saw a post on, “Which is better, a farmer who generates $1M of incremental business, or a hunter who generates $1M of new business?” It’s as if $M from one is better than $1M from the other—they miss the point that each is developing $1M of incremental revenue! That’s what sales people are supposed to do, they are supposed to develop […]