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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
Is Your Prospecting Call Relevant?
You’ve all experienced this, you download a white paper, maybe you sign up to evaluate a new SaaS tool. Within minutes, the phone rings, it’s an anxious SDR. “I see you are interested in our products, can I tell you more about them, or set up a meeting for you to learn more? “Can I set up a demo?” “When do you plan on buying, who will be involved in the decision making process?” Forget that you haven’t even gotten the white paper, or the logon link to the tool. These anxious sales people are already far down the road […]
1:1’s, Leveraging An Important Management Coaching Tool
The team at WideAngle and their CEO, Jon Birdsong hosted several of us in a fascinating discussion on One On Ones. Jon invited Shelley Gaynes of Gee Wiz Consulting, Rob Beattie of Thompson Reuters, and me for a fascinating discussion on what One On Ones are, how we are most effective in connecting with our people, how we leverage One On Ones to drive learning, development and performance. It was a hugely fun conversation and learned a huge amount. I was flattered and appreciate Jon and the WideAngle Team inviting me to participate. By the way, if you aren’t familiar with WideAngle, they […]
Your “Business Justified Solution” Is Insufficient To Win The Business!
I’ve been talking to a team of people about Value Propositions. They need to start providing business justification to their solutions–demonstrating their business value and differentiation. It’s exciting to see their excitement in doing this. Too few sales people understand how to do this, or take the time to present a business case for their solutions. Most of the time the customer is left to figure it out. You know what happens, the focus becomes more on price and less on business value. Being able to prevent business justified solutions is mandatory for every deal, those that don’t do this […]
Finding Customers Who Aren’t Looking
There’s no doubt that digital media, rich content, search and other technique drive huge demand. Ideally, these create inbound leads which are wonderful for everyone. With inbound, we have some level of awareness and possible interest. We have some context in which to engage. It’s compelling–both for the customer and for the sales person. If you generate sufficient volume to fill your pipelines and make your numbers, I suppose you don’t need to go any further. Probably, marketing and sales can do their “High Five’s,” congratulate each other and move on. But there are problems with this approach. First, I […]
Is Your Mindset Limiting You?
Recently, I’ve been having a number of conversations about Mindset. I’ve been doing research on the topic of Obsessive Learning/Relentless Execution, trying to understand what makes top performers in all sorts of disciplines. I’d developed some premises around it and believe it’s all about a growth mindset. Let me backtrack a little. Carol Dweck wrote a wonderful book, Mindset. It’s something everyone should read. In the book, she outlines two mindsets Fixed Mindset: People with a fixed mindset believe “their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent are simply fixed traits…. They believe talent alone creates success.” Growth Mindset: “People believe that […]
What Customer Problems Do You Solve, Not What Do You Do!
I was leading a discussion about value propositions with a group of product developers and marketers. We were getting ready to launch a new product, I was helping develop the launch plan. I posed the question, “What customer problems do you solve?” The answers followed the same pattern as virtually every other group in which I’ve posed that question. Most often, the response to the question begins with one of the following: “Our product has these features………” “We provide these capabilities…..” “We do this….” The discussions go through long lists of features, functions, feeds, speeds, capabilities and so forth, but […]