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
Commissions Drive Bad Sales Behaviors And Screw The Customer!!
I’ve been at the periphery of a number of discussions about commissions and sales. Usually, they are very polarized discussions, with people on each side taking extreme positions, neither providing useful or data based arguments, neither listening too each other and each reinforcing the others’ positions. Usually there’s one camp evangelizing the evils of commission (There’s one CEO making a lot of noise on this issue in LinkedIn, though I suspect he has not given up his own executive bonus/incentive compensation plan.) Likewise there are those that say, you can’t drive sales results without commission. They’re a little comical to […]
Creating Low Effort Customer Experiences — A Conversation With Dione Hedgpeth Of Apptio
Low effort for the customer, that is! Too often, we get customer experience design wrong–focusing on minimizing our work and effort, while we may create a horrible experience from the customers’ points of view. If we want to drive customer engagement–for the life of our relationship with them, if we want to drive customer loyalty and retention, we have to focus on low effort customers experiences–for the customer. Join me in listening to a terrific conversation with Dione Hedgpeth, Vice President of Customer Success for Apptio. In this 25 minute conversation, Dione and I cover a wide variety of topics […]
Powerful Email Marketing
I wish I were smart enough to make up these stories. Today, I received an unsolicited email titled, “Would you like to blog about sales automation.” Here is the text, the only thing I have changed is the company/product name (I’m calling it Company X). I did highlight the spelling errors. I started to highlight the grammar errors, but when the entire first sentence was RED, I stopped. Hi David, I’ve been reading your blog for several month now, especially I liked the article on [ARTICLE NAME]. I happenned to use these ideas when I built my own business, so […]
Our Customers Can’t Afford For Us To Wait Until They Are 70% Through Their Buying Cycle!
It’s that time of year again, there are lots of posts around the popular research that indicates, “Customers aren’t engaging sales until they are, 57, 70, 90 (depending on the research you read) through their buying cycle.” As usual with the posts, there are the usual doom and gloom announcements about the future of selling and the “death of the traditional sales person.” Depending on the point of view being promoted and the services or tools being sold by the writer, things are shifting to social, marketing automation, content, inbound inside sales, and any other configuration of whatever is being promoted. I’m […]
Sales People, We Have A PR Problem
Sales people, we have a PR problem, …..it’s Real,…… and we probably deserve it, …. and we need to do something about it. I just read this post by Brian de Haaff, CEO of Aha, This CEO Will Never Hire A Sales Person. My initial reaction was, “This guy is clueless about professional sales.” He spoke about displacing sales with a Customer Success team, people dedicated to making sure customers are successful. People on a profit sharing plan, but with no quota, not prospecting, without commissions, dedicated to the customers’ success. He went on to explain companies like his need to […]
The Product Focused Company
I spend a good amount of time calling on the customers and prospects of my clients. Recently, I was doing some win reviews. We were very interested in learning more about why these customers bought from my client. The key competitor was much larger and the dominant force in the industry. Winning against them was a real coup, we wanted to learn more about how we could repeat that. The competitor, like my client, had a very broad product line. There were significant overlaps between the product lines, both those of the competition and those of my client. So the […]