Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
What About My Goals? A Time For Selfishness
I had a call from a frustrated sales person. He said, “Dave, I read your stuff all the time. You are relentless in focusing on the customer, their problems, and their goals. I get it, but I’m in trouble, I need to achieve my goals!! That’s what I really care about!” I really get where this sales person is coming from. Undoubtedly, 10’s of thousands of other sales professionals are thinking the same thing. Truth be told, I try to say “No” to anything that doesn’t enable me to achieve my goals. I’m very selfish, virtually everything I do, including […]
Turning The Volume Up Won’t Get You More Attention
Recently, I was asked to comment on the impact of attention scarcity in modern marketing. It was for an eBook on The Attention Economy sponsored by the people at LookbookHQ. The eBook is really outstanding, with some very interesting views from a wide range of sales and marketing leaders. I encourage you to take a look at it. As a sample, I thought I’d provide the text of my piece in the article. It follows below: Some years ago, I was in Nairobi on business. In the morning, as I walked out of my hotel, I was surrounded by dozens […]
Why Do We Continue To Get The Basics Of Value So Wrong?
Hopefully, any person in a sales role knows the importance of value–whatever you choose to call it, a value proposition, value creation/co-creation, value articulation, value delivery, value realization. Hopefully, anyone who has been in sales more than 5 minutes knows we have to provide differentiated value to even hope to compete, let alone win. While it doesn’t seem an advanced concept, sales professionals should know that only the customer can define what they value, that we have to position what we do in the context of what each customer values. All of these seem to be the very most basic […]
We Can Only Create Value With The Customer, Not For The Customer
For regular readers, you probably are wondering, I’ve long talked about the importance of value creation. Recently, there has been quite a bit of discussion about this following my post Can Sales Create Value, both on this blog and at Customerthink. I encourage you to read the comments/discussion. They are perhaps better than the original post. I’ve been reminded by a few people that we create value with the customer, not for the customer. Lest you think this is wordsmithing, it’s an important distinction. Often, we think of creating value by provoking the customer to think differently about their business. […]
WebMD And The 57%
As happens from time to time, I had been feeling a little off for a few weeks. There were some persistent physical symptoms that bothered me. Initially, I thought they would go away, but they didn’t, a few worsened. I started to get concerned, but for a variety of reasons chose not to go to the Doctor. I started to do my web research to learn more about my ailments. WebMD, the Mayo Clinic site, Dr. Oz, and a number of other sites helped me research. After a while, I had narrowed my research to a few diseases, deciding it was now […]
What’s The Customer’s “Whole Problem”
Our focus, naturally, is on what we sell. More accurately, it’s on what problems our products and solutions solve. For the moment, I’ll ignore that most sales people don’t do well at this most basic areas of working with customers. One of the biggest challenges to our success in selling, is that we seldom solve the customer’s “whole problem.” It’s their problem they care about, not just the component we address. The simplest example is if our customer is building a product–let’s imagine a new smartphone. We may provide all the internal electronics, but that’s only a small part of […]