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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
“Let’s Catch Up……”
A couple of times a day, I skim my “Junk Mail” folder checking to see if there are legit messages then emptying it. The minute it takes me to do this also provides great comic relief on the hundreds of inept prospecting emails I get. These are legitimate emails from well established companies–not the emails asking me to buy cheap drugs or to help free a fortune held captive in a West African company. They are emails from well established brands/companies. Unfortunately, they’ve bought a list from a disreputable list management firm, or they’ve scraped the web, or they’ve “deconstructed” […]
Letting The Customer “Opt-Out” Is Not A Nurturing Strategy
I had an interesting, unexpected reaction to my “Stop Nurturing Me” post. An individual commented, “prospects have the option to opt-out of being nurtured, as do customers…..” The comment, while well intended, frankly struck me as very misguided. Forcing the customer to opt-out is actually an indication of a massive failure on our part. It means we haven’t taken the time to really understand the customer—their journey to learn and educate themselves, their “squishy buying cycle,” and their quest for more learning once they’ve bought. If we are building high quality, impactful content; if we are trying to build customer […]
How B2B Buyers Make Purchase Decisions
I’m a great fan of Jeff Shore. Recently, he wrote a post, The Buying Formula: Here’s How Your Customers Make Purchase Decisions. It’s brilliant in it’s simplicity and is a great starting point to look at the challenges of B2B Decision-making. Jeff, makes several critical points. He poses the question, Why does anyone buy anything? Then answering it, “It all comes down to one simple motivating factor: The desire to improve one’s life.” It’s easy to understand this in the context of individual or personal purchases, but too often overlooked in B2B sales. We’re trained to look at the business […]
What Sales People Can Learn From High Jumping
High jumping is a fascinating metaphor for sales success, at least in my mind. First, it’s the only competitive sport I know where to be successful, you have to first Flop. OK, maybe I’m stretching things a little–by now you’re used to my perverse and twisted humor. In 1965, Dick Fosbury revolutionized the world of high jumping with his creation of the “Fosbury Flop.” His technique enabled high jumpers to clear jumps that were unimaginable with other techniques. The Fosbury Flop is still the dominant style of jumping today. For my non American readers, Flop is also a synonym or […]
Stop Nurturing Me!
“Nurturing” has become the big buzzword of content marketing. Everyone is trying to nurture their prospects and customer. Marketing wants to develop a “relationship” with customers. They want to educate customers, they want to influence them as they go through their buying process, continuing to send relevant information, helping educate the customer as they progress. Marketing wants to continue to “touch the customer” maintain contact and awareness. Theoretically nurturing programs are supposed to be informative, relevant. Nurturing helps to inform and educate the customer — at a pace and in a manner important to the customer, not the marketing team. Ideally, nurturing […]
Measuring Outcomes Not Activities
We’re proud of the marketing and sales metrics we have in place. I sit in meeting after meeting with people going through endless charts showing their performance across any number of metrics. Too often, however, we see huge disconnects in what the metrics show and the most important performance metrics–revenue/profitability attainment, growth, share, customer satisfaction, customer growth/retention, and so forth. Ultimately these disconnects come from measuring the wrong things. Usually it was from measuring the activities–not the outcomes of those activities. Here are some examples, I’ve seen recently: Everyone in an outbound call center was measured on the number of […]