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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
Who Is This Important To?
We are taught to “call high.” We want to reach the top executives in an organization, getting their support in buying our solutions. In our best days, we have articulated a business case about the impact of our solutions. “We can reduce costs by $10M. We can reduce swelling admin time by 20%, we can increase revenue by $100M…..” The numbers can appear big, particularly in context of the investment the customer may have to make in our solutions. But too often, when we are focusing on the approval of top executives, these results produce a MEH reaction. In the […]
Pushy Vs. Pushing, A Matter Of Context
Sellers are too Pushy! Customers always seem to move more slowly than sellers want. They wander, waste time that sellers don’t have. Sellers are anxious to move things forward! Get the meeting, get the demo, get the order! Sellers have always been known for being pushy, we as sellers recognize it, we high five each other on our clever techniques to get the customer to commit faster. Customers have always recognized it, that’s why they want nothing to do with sellers. Whether responding to spamming emails/texts/social outreach, avoiding meetings, trying to perfect their seller free buying journey! We all recognize […]
Is The Problem You Solve The Problem The Customers Have?
Recently, I’ve been having a number of fascinating conversations with sellers on “the problem to be solved.” I’ve been asking them, “What problem do you solve?” The responses usually focus on what their products/solutions do. They aren’t feature discussions (which is great), rather they describe things like, “we improve data accuracy, integrity, and quality.” Or “we reduce time on administrative tasks,” or any number of things. While these are “problems,” what we are really describing is what our offerings do, and not centering on the problems the customer cares about. While data accuracy and time spent on administrative tasks are […]
“Getting Out Of The Building……”
Steve Blank has a concept he calls, “Getting out of the building.” Tom Peters has written about a similar concept, MBWA–Management By Walking Around. These are similar approaches focused on how we really get to know and understand our customers, it’s seeing them in their “natural habitats.” Much of my career has been built on this principle, whether it is wandering around customer facilities, or the organizations I led. There was always something different about wandering the halls and offices of my customers and people. Doing this enabled me to see how they really work. I saw how they engaged […]
Tilting The Numbers In Our Favor, In Praise Of Lazy Sellers
We have metrics for virtually anything in selling. We have endless performance metrics, activity measures, pipeline/forecast, deal, prospecting, account retention, growth and other metrics. We have marketing and customer experience metrics. It seems we want to and can measure almost anything in selling, but we struggle with how to use them. As an example, every year, I must review over 1000 pipelines. They are rarely healthy. When I ask sellers what they are doing to fix their pipelines, the universal answer is, “We have to fill the pipeline, we need our people to do more prospecting!” That is a fine […]
“Quid Pro Quo And Caring”
Charlie Green wrote a stunning post, “Relationships Are Everything” Some of the ensuing discussion, both in the comments on the post and Charlie and my private notes to each other focused on the transactional nature of so much of what we do. “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.” Quid pro quo is sometimes mistaken as a form of caring. In Charlie’s post he describes a situation where one of his colleagues demonstrated enormous empathy and caring for a troubled client. And while the situation passed, that client provided Charlie’s colleague with millions of dollars of business. One could […]