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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
Sales People Build Your Personal Brand And Thought Leadership!
Thousands of blogs and articles on social selling, media, marketing focus on building Personal Brands and Thought Leadership. The experts proclaim sales people must become thought leaders and focus on building their personal brands. These same experts say sales people must engage socially, whether through blogging, social engagement, or whatever mechanisms, developing and demonstrating their thought leadership to prospects, customers and markets. In truth I struggled with these concepts. From a corporate management point of view, I’ve always thought it more important to build and reinforce a company’s brand and thought leadership. I’ve wondered why a sales person with a […]
Just In Time Content
I wrote, “Sales Must Own And Solve The Content Marketing Problem,” There was a lot of discussion, and a lot of misunderstanding, some thought I was actually arguing for sales people to start writing content, some were confused by my use of creating content for “the last mile.” In reflecting on the comments, both in the post and email, I realized there is a misunderstanding of “Content.” In some sense, with all respect to the one or two friends I have in marketing, content has been hijacked. We’ve come to think of “Content” as that stuff which is the exclusive domain […]
“Delivering Your Value Proposition” Is Not A Step In Your Sales Process!
Before going further in this article, stop for a moment and look at the steps and activities in your sales process. At some point is there something similar to, “Deliver value proposition to customer?” Now a few of you may be scratching your heads–if you don’t have a sales process, you are in deep trouble. Do not pass Go, do not Collect $200, go immediately to Jail!* For some of you, the idea might be phrased a little differently, it might be an aggressive, “Gain customer agreement on value proposition.” Usually, it’s toward the end of the sales process, as […]
Your Value Proposition Is Irrelevant To Me!
You probably get a lot of the same prospecting emails that I get. Whether it’s someone trolling groups in LinkedIn, or somehow they’ve gotten your email address, I get dozens of prospecting letters each week. All of them are very predictable: They apologize for intruding. They talk about themselves and their products. They always present a compelling “value proposition” on work they’ve done with “organizations like yours.” I won’t waste my time on the first two items. By now, I hope we all know this is really bad practice. But, I’d like to spend time on the third point. I see lots of […]
Throw Away Your Value Proposition, It’s Meaningless!
Hold onto your outbursts of, “Dave, you’ve lost it!” Also, recognize that I may be playing a few word games–but with a purpose. I’ve become distressed with the state of thinking about “Value Propositions.” Too often, they are viewed as the “silver bullet.” Wishful thinking like, “If I just get the right value proposition, it will overcome any doubts or resistance a customer has, they’ll issue a purchase order….” I get requests for help, “Can you help me create a killer value proposition?” As if there is the one thing that will cause the customer to be interested. People thinking […]
When Are We Being Manipulative? When Is It Just Best Practice?
Few would promote blatant manipulation of the customer to achieve our goals. We are regaled with stories of sales people shamelessly manipulating customers. The manipulation may be outright deception about the capabilities of a product or service. It may be deceitful pricing or contracting processes. It may be taking advantage of a situation–perhaps a customer’s misfortune. It may be “bait and switch techniques.” It may be high pressure selling techniques. The methods of manipulation go back millennium’s to the very first sales transactions. There’ve been various labels applied to sales people using these techniques–hucksters, charlatans, or “snake oil” salespeople are […]