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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
Differentiation, Dissimilarity, Disruption
Recently, I was being interviewed on value creation and differentiation. I was asked the question, “What’s the difference between differentiation and dissimilarity?” The question caused me to pause for a moment. Frankly, I hadn’t thought about it before, but the more I thought, it’s an important distinction for sales people and can become an important strategic issue for executives and business strategists. It’s easiest to understand these concepts if we take a walk into a friend’s garage. It’s an interesting, eclectic set of vehicles: A Porsche 911, an F-150 Pickup, Ducati and KTM motorcycles. Let me add to this idea. […]
Are You Creating Value Or Cost?
There are thousands of posts and hundreds of books on Value Creation. I’ve, in fact, written 285 since starting this blog and dozens of others at other sites. The themes in all of this stuff usually follow a similar line of thinking: Customers define value in their own terms. Sellers have to create value aligned with what the customer thinks is important. To win, we have to create more value than anyone else. From there, things start getting a little fuzzy, because we start wrapping pricing and discounting into the whole concept of value creation. Theoretically, we justify higher prices […]
How To Read A Sales Or Marketing Blog Post
Actually, this might be applicable to virtually any professional article or book you might pick up. But let me go into a bit of a back story before I go on. Yesterday morning, I got an email from a client and close friend. He was ranting about a blog post another friend had written. Friend A said, “This is naïve, simplistic, completely off base for most B2B sales! How can this guy (Friend B) write this stuff? It’s irresponsible!” Friend A has a huge amount of credibility with me, he’s been the top sales executive of some of the largest […]
Perfect Prospecting
Recently, I published a rant on LinkedIn, “Patient 0 Of Stupid Prospecting.” This rant targeted a self appointed Sales Guru and Sales Trainer who had helped “thousands of sales people” over 15 years. A couple of people commented, “What does perfect prospecting look like?” I can’t tell you what perfect prospecting looks like, but I can tell you how to do it. Simply put perfect prospecting means “doing the work.” actually, “doing the right work.” Let me explain. Sloppy prospecting is too easy. Get an email list of a few thousand people, spend 15 minutes writing an email, push send. […]
How You Make Your Number Is As Important As Making The Number!
As a young sales person, I must have really frustrated my managers. I was disorganized, undisciplined–in short, all over the place. In spite of that, I always made my number….. Well, I’ve got to be honest, I had lots of ups and downs. Some months I’d miss, another month, I’d blow away my number, but I always made my number for the year! Usually on December 31 at 23:45. It drove my managers crazy. While I always made my number, I couldn’t tell them how I was going to make it. I worked hard, scrambled a lot, and had some […]
It’s Not About You!
I’d spent a long day doing deal reviews and a few critical call planning reviews. Everyone was well prepared—part of it was they knew they had to be. Apparently, my reputation for being tough had preceded me. The reviews were filled with strategies, goals, action plans. Many had deep competitive analysis with plans to overcome the competition. The discussions with team members and managers focused on “What are we selling, When, How Much Will We Get, What are the risks, When can you commit to the forecast, When do we need to ship, Can we upsell them, What discounting do […]