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
The Problem With Pitch Decks
I’ve seen thousands of pitch decks. The vast majority are horrible. There’s the corporate vanity deck. It always has a lot of slides. Usually it mentions the customer name in about 3 places, on the cover slide, the second to last slide, and the last slide. The rest of the deck is all about the vendor. You are regaled with size, locations, financial performance, logos of customers, and all sorts of stuff telling the customer how wonderful they are and why the customer would be a fool to buy from anyone else. There’s the product presentation deck. These are huge decks, usually […]
The Collaboration Formula
I’m attending CEB’s Sales and Marketing Summit. If you ever have the opportunity, it’s a very worthwhile conference. Between the discussions over the past couple of days and come coincident phone and email discussions I’ve had while here, the concept of collaboration has been a huge underlying theme. Whether it’s how we work with our colleagues and team members more effectively, how we collaborate with customers–facilitating their own opportunity-solving process, or helping them to buy, the concepts of collaboration underlie virtually everything we do. Collaborations come in all shapes and sizes. They could be career long collaborations with colleagues in […]
Solving The Customer’s Problem
Yesterday, I had one of those “Aha” moments. I realized that much of what I’ve been talking about for years has been wrong. Well not completely wrong but off target enough to be significant. I’ve written and advocated about helping customers buy, facilitating their buying process, or even leading them through buying when they don’t know how to buy. Now all of that is great stuff. Far better than what normal sales people do in “showing up and throwing up,” or pitching products. But, it’s based on the assumption that “buying” is critical to the customer. In reality, the customer […]
What If The Customer Doesn’t Know Their Buying Process?
We all know the customer’s buying process is more important than our selling process. If we are to be effective, we are supposed to align our selling process with the customer buying process, staying in sync through the entire journey. But we’re also confronted with stunning data about the huge number of forecast deals that end in no decision made. Challenger Customer has offered amazing insights into the difficulty customers have in aligning themselves around their own decision-making process, then marching through it. Reflecting on the struggles buyers have as outlined in the Challenger Customer, one starts to think, “Perhaps […]
Paying Attention
Perhaps it’s because it’s early Fall (for us in the Northern Hemisphere), but a couple of things have happened this weekend that have caused me to stop and reflect–actually to pay attention. I have just rediscovered “Vinyl.” What I mean, is that I’ve rediscovered physical record albums and the pleasure of listening to music. Some of you might be thinking this will become a discussion about the vastly improved quality and sound. It’s what Neil Young is trying with Pono, or Jay Z with Tidal. With Vinyl, the quality of the music is better–but in truth, I struggle to detect the […]
Gratuitous Name Dropping And Other Deceptions
I got an interesting email from a lead gen company. There was a fascinating line in the email: “We just published a study at [Company Name] about how conversion rates on cold sales emails improve if you gratuitously mention a famous customer, investor, or shared LinkedIn contact.” I was intrigued by this and called few people to check this out. After brief conversations with Donald Trump, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Jack Welch, Chuck Robbins, Mark Zuckerberg, Ginny Rometty, Carl Icahn, Larry Fink, Barack Obama, Tom Cruise, Jennifer Lawrence, Tom Hanks, Ellen DeGeneris, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, Jay Z, […]