Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Deal Slippage
Deal slippage is a huge issue for all sellers, but also for buyers. Let’s dive into what drives deal slippage. Most deal slippage is not really deal slippage. Let me call it “faux slippage.” This slippage has nothing to do with the buyer, their sense of urgency, or when they need to have a solution in place. Faux slippages is a result of seller error. It occurs for any number of reasons, including: We act as though target close dates are important, but we don’t tend to focus on the importance and the basis for selecting a certain date. One […]
“This Is What We Do…..”
So many of our prospecting and initial conversations start with a variant of “This is what we do….” It may be phrased as a question, “Do you need solutions that help you do these things….?” Or it may be more directly tied to our products, “Our product will help you achieve this….” However we phrase it, from the outset of the conversation, we are focusing the attention on us, our company, and our products. And our prospects and customers don’t care! It’s this focus on what we do and not what the customer cares about that impacts our ability to […]
Thinking About Retention, Renewal, Expansion Differently
It is human nature to look at things from our own points of view. But it’s restricting our thinking in those ways that blinds us to things that are changing around us, threats, opportunities, challenges, disruptions. Retention, renewal, expansion is key to our success with customers. We want to create customers for life! We want to have the continue to buy from us. It may be upgrading to our latest product, for example going from the IPhone 15 to the anticipated IPhone 16. It may be renewing subscriptions to current products, keeping them using our products forever. It may be […]
The Conundrum Of “Freeing Up Time,” Part 2
Time management is always an issue, and with everyone. We leverage tools, techniques, technologies that are supposed to make us more efficient and to free up time. But we still struggle. I wrote about the challenge high performers face in “The Conundrum Of Freeing Up Time, Part 1.” This post focuses on how we look at this issue with medium and low performers. In the past two decades, we have been overwhelmed with technologies that focus on improving the efficiency of our people. In the past two years AI tools have accelerated this. We can generate more emails in a […]
The Conundrum Of “Freeing Up Time,” Part 1
We, rightfully, constantly seek to free up time. Yesterday, coaching an executive, the key issue was “freeing up time.” For such a senior executive, to some it might seem surprising, but it comes up in virtually every conversation I have, at every level of the organization. It’s interesting, I see two, almost diametrically oppose, things happening when we look to free up time. One is, despite the time that is freed up, there are always more demands on our time than time available. It’s characteristic of the busiest but most productive people I encounter and seems to be a persistent […]
The Erosion Of Our Expectations…..
Long time followers know I spend a lot of time advising telcom companies around the world–equipment manufacturers, service providers, others. When I first started working closely with them in the 90’s. quality of service was one of the most critical issues for each one. What attracted and retained customers was the quality of each voice call–the clarity and accuracy of the voices, time lags, stability of the connection, static, all sorts of thins. For data, there were similar concerns about quality of service. When I started working with them, I wondered about this obsession, thinking, “Is it really that important?” […]