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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
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, […]
Turn Up The Volume, I Can’t Hear You!
It seems we’ve become consumed by volume! Just look at the so many of the blog posts are articles. We are exhorted to “live life at 1000 dials per day,” conduct social selling at “scale,” “tweet your way to 1000’s of followers,” “How to get 10,000 Facebook fans,” “How to get 10,000 LinkedIn connections relevant to your business,” “How I got 1,000,000 followers on LinkedIn,” “How to send 40,000 emails a day,” “What we learned from 1000 cold emails,” “Cold calling 100 prospects a day,” “How to generate 1000’s of leads.” I’ll stop here, there are literally…….. well, 1000’s of […]
Rethinking Sales Skills And Competencies
Wayne Gretzky has the famous quote describing why he is an all time top performer in the NHL. I’m sure you know it, but he answered the question about how he managed to perform so well by saying, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is.” (Yeah, I know this quote has become a cliche, but it is still great!) Unfortunately, as I talk to executives and sales people alike, particularly around skills and competencies critical to sales success, I get the impression we are focused on “where the puck is.” That is, most […]
Stop All This Nonsense About Value Add!
There’s a fascinating discussion about the various dimensions of “value” driven by Deb Calvert’s article on Why Prospects Are Buying From Your Competitors. Here’s the link to the discussion, be sure to look at it. But there is a part of the discussion that really bothers me, it’s about the concept of Value Add. First, all of us have been raised to think about and sell our Value Add. It’s become second nature to every sales person. It’s all those extra things that we “add” to the basic value the customer expects. “If you buy from me, here are all […]