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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
Are You Commoditizing Your Customers?
Everyone understands the challenges of selling commoditized products. They are perceived as undifferentiated. In the customers’ and markets’ eyes, there is no difference between these products, regardless the supplier. To win with commoditized products, we have to find some way to differentiate ourselves. Too often, we differentiate through pricing. Adept sellers broaden the purchase considerations, differentiating on non-product attributes that are important to customers. But as sellers, none of us want to be “commoditized,” it makes things so much more difficult. Pause for a moment and consider, “In our marketing and sales efforts, are we commoditizing the customer?” Those “Dear […]
Bits And Pieces, March 5, 2017
As usual with these pieces, there are several items I haven’t found the opportunity to include in normal blog posts, so this is where I can provide a number of short discussions about things capturing my interest and which may capture yours. Charity Water: Every year, I start a campaign for Charity Water in December, it runs through the end of March. This year’s campaign is another record breaker. My goal is to reach $10K in this campaign (making the collective total for campaigns over $50K). I have a stretch goal of $15K. At this writing, we’re at $6,115, […]
The Tragedy Of Either/Or
Our society and business worlds seem to be becoming increasingly polarized with group taking extreme positions, suggesting their way is the “Right Way!” They argue that everything else is wrong and terrible things befall those not doing it their way. Social media channels are filled with people taking these positions. There are the social selling and “cold calling” camps, each thinking the other is wrong. There are the marketing versus selling camps, each taking positions they are the most important contributors to revenue growth. There are the high velocity/high volume advocates that claim they’ve discovered the secret to predictable revenue. […]
Account Based Everything Applies To Everything!
Account Based Marketing (ABM), Account Based Selling (ABS), and Account Based Everything (ABE) are hot topics these days, particularly in the As-A-Service worlds. There are articles, books, conferences focused on these topics. Observing the interest around these topics, one begins to think, “They seem to have discovered the hidden secret to sales and marketing success.” In some ways, perhaps they have, but in reality, all of this is based on the same basic principles of all sales and marketing success. ABM/ABS/ABE principles are pretty simple: Identify your target accounts. Study and understand them. Understand their business, their customers, markets, competitors, […]
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 […]