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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
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. […]
Sales Enablement Versus The Front Line Sales Manager
Mike Kunkle is leading an important discussion about a new trend in Sales Enablement. Mike identifies the issue: “I’ve been reading Sales Enablement leadership job descriptions lately. I find it concerning how many paint the enabler as responsible for working directly with reps to improve their performance. Not as an occasional field support effort, or a reality check on what’s happening out there, but as a main tenet of the role. And the front line managers are doing what, exactly” Like Mike, I’m seeing the same trend. Increasingly, sales enablement organizations are being staffed up and given the responsibility to […]
Automation: Are We Empowering Human Interaction Or Displacing It?
The sales and marketing technology along with the social networking/selling technologies represent a huge amount of the changes that are driving sales and marketing. They relieve us of many of the tasks that used to take lots of time, enabling us to focus that time on engaging customers and colleagues. They help us in better understanding our customers, markets, and what’s happening, so that we can engage customers with more relevant insights on more timely bases. They enable us to extend our reach, beyond our local geographies to the global community. They help us create greater value for our customers, […]
Account Strategies, How Important Are We To The Customer?
Account Based Everything has been the rage of the past couple of years. The principles of ABE are outstanding–focused on further tailoring and personalization of our marketing and sales approaches to the specific needs and priorities of the customer–both the enterprise and individual (actually these are great principles for any customer outreach). Inevitably, we start putting these accounts into our account programs: Major Accounts, Key Accounts, Strategic Accounts, Corporate Accounts, Global Strategic Accounts, Super Duper Really Humongous Very Special Accounts (OK, I invented that one). We do these things because the customer is important to us. We want to retain […]