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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
Sales People Change The World!
Recently, I was privileged to observe a series of training sessions at Microchip. My friend, Mitch Little, kicked off the session with some introductory comments. One sentence captivated me, “We change the world…” That has been occupying my thinking since I heard Mitch make the statement. Sales people have the opportunity to change the world! Think about that for a moment, what we do impacts our customers, organizationally and individually. It changes them, even if in a very small way. We help customers solve problems, improving what they do and the results they produce. We help them discover opportunities they […]
Are You So Busy Selling Your Product, That You Won’t Win The Deal?
Don Mulhern published a brilliant post in LinkedIn the other day. I thought I’d expand on his ideas. I spend innumerable hours doing deal reviews. 95% go the same way, they focus on the product the sales person is selling, not what the customer is trying to achieve and how we can help the customer do that. Sales people spend endless hours talking about: This is what they like in our product, this is what they like in the competition. We showed them these things in the demo, they really liked it! We just need to overcome these perceptions of […]
Make Buying Easier!
As sales people, we want to make it easy for our customers to buy. We have endless amounts of data sheets, cases studies, presentations, and information about our products. We seek to be super responsive to our customers informational needs, immediately burying them with information, conducting endless demos to respond to their questions. Marketing helps us, both with the content and making vast arrays of information available through multiple digital and non-digital channels. They leverage SEO, online advertising, drip campaigns and any number of techniques to make it easier for prospects and customers to find information about our products and […]
Why Do We Sell?
Some may be wondering about the “existential” nature of this title. Some may be thinking, “Well, that’s stupid Dave, it’s our job.” Others might say, “I’m money motivated and it’s a way I can make a lot of money!” We choose to become sales people for a variety of reasons. For some, it’s the only job we could get coming out of college. For some it is a path to getting rich, though I can think of a lot of other paths to get richer, faster. This week, I had an amazing experience. I observed two days of training of […]
Customers Should Care About Your Profitability!
Too often, we succumb to price pressure–even worse, we lead with price, making pricing the center of focus of our sales efforts, then being forced to discount to “win” the business. What if we started shifting our conversations from discussions of discounting to educating them about the importance, to them, of maintaining our pricing and our profitability? In complex B2B sales, the profitability and success of the suppliers is critical to the success of customers. What happens to customers who focus only on hammering vendors on price? To meet price goals, suppliers start sacrificing quality or ability to meet commitments. […]
Value Proposition, “What Might You Be Doing Instead?”
We can learn a lot about value propositions by looking at the vast new array of personal services available through the web. For example, I have a Virtual Assistant. This person spends a few hours a week doing things I used to do. They are a lot of the administrative tasks that used to take some of my time. I’m paying this person to do these things, but what she does frees up time for me to invest in things that are more important. Things that I just never got around to, because I had to do those administrative tasks. […]