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
Not Knowing What We Don’t Know
Too often, both our work and that of our customers focuses on learning or knowing what we don’t know. We know customers do much of their research digitally–according to research they may be 57-90% through their buying process and 94% of customers do some level of digital research or self education (I think it should be 100%). For example, if I want to improve my email marketing, all I have to do is type that into Google, and I get 12.7M results in 0.52 seconds. Possibly I want to leverage social selling effectively, I get 28.6M results in less than […]
Are You Really Different?
We know the importance of differentiating ourselves in attempting to win business. We try to do this at our web sites, often posting comparisons and charts showing how we have more features and functions than the alternatives. Too often, we think differentiation is about checking more feature boxes, having a richer product, than the competition. Web sites are filled with pages of, “Our Value Proposition.” Only when you compare competitors side by side, they say the same things—we improve your results, reduce your costs, improve quality, Blah, Blah, Blah…… Sales people go through endless demos, showing the capabilities of their […]
Of Course Sales Is About Relationships!
I am fuming at one of the most amazingly naive posts about “the Death Of Sales.” Ironically it’s written by a sales leader at one of the leading Marketing and Sales Automation company. Even more ironically, the call to action at the end of his post is to recruit partners to sell his company’s products. And his products are focused on helping sales people become more effective! WTF!!!! He starts his article with the sentence, “Sales people are not necessary….” He claiming that it’s easy to claim that “relationships are the cornerstone of every sale,” and “there is no replacement […]
Enabling Customers To Take The Actions We Want?
I just read an article, one sentence struck me, “Value is created when you enable the customer to take the actions you want them to take.” To tell you the truth, that statement bothers me, but it in reflecting, I thought there is a variant to that statement: Value is created when we enable the customer to take the actions they need to take! What’s the difference between the two sentences? It’s really a matter of perspective. The first focuses primarily on us, getting the outcomes we want. Clearly, the actions we want the customer to take is to buy […]
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, […]