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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
How To Ruin A Great Customer Experience
I took my car in to be serviced the other day. The dealership has done a fantastic job in designing a great customer experience. I made my appointment online, it was easy to choose a time that was convenient for me. The day before they sent me a reminder and introduced me to “Dale,” my service advisor. I showed up at the appointed time. Since my car is web-enabled, apparently it had been “talking” to the service department even before I arrived. Dale met me, greeted me pleasantly, then said, “This is what we need to do to the car […]
Marketing And Sales Alignment Or Integration?
I’m fascinated about a lot of the discussion about marketing and sales alignment. Inevitably, the discussion narrows to MQL’s and SQL’s. The alignment discussion inevitably focuses on gaining agreement on the definition and metrics surrounding these two metrics. Some of the things discussed are, agreement and alignment around the definition of lead quality and lead volume. Usually marketing is saying “sales isn’t following up on our leads, consequently we’re losing lots of opportunity.” Sales takes the position, “The leads we get are crap, just because someone wants a white paper doesn’t mean I should be wasting my time calling them.” I still […]
Teaching Our Customers To Sell
I recently wrote about Teaching Our Customers To Buy. In the article I mentioned the importance of customers selling within their own organizations. To many, that’s an unnatural, detestable act. After all, if they wanted to sell, they’d be sales people, wouldn’t they? “Selling,” internally, is critical to people getting things done and moving their initiatives, strategies, programs forward. Within organizations, there’s always selling going between people and groups, but people don’t tend to think of it that way. Too often, also, people are relatively naïve about how to get what they want within their organizations. They think, “I put […]
Prognostications And Wild Ass Guesses For 2015
We’re officially into the fourth calendar quarter of the year. It’s the time where you start seeing various pundits dusting off their crystal balls guessing what the big issues facing sales and marketing professionals in 2015. It’s also the time, various publications ask my views–even though at times I think my crystal ball is a little murky, I’ll contribute to those. I worry that I start showing my age, that I start looking old/crotchety, or that I appear slightly cynical. But every time I read these articles and start discussing the big issues for the coming year, I get this […]
Teaching Our Customers To Buy
By now, at least if you’ve been reading the literature on selling, we know the importance of Insight, Commercial Teaching/Learning, or whatever you call it. The focus of these are to help the customer realize there are opportunities they may be missing. There are opportunities to grow, to improve their businesses, to reduce costs, to improve their customer experience, to respond more quickly to competition —- to recognize the need to change. If we’re successful at this, we get the customer all hot and lathered to change. To do something different, to take action. Now the hard work begins. With […]
“Dear Occupant Or Current Resident….” More Horrible Prospecting
I’ve decided to write a periodic series about bad prospecting letters. Every week, I receive dozens of just horrible letters. Fortunately, Outlook does a pretty good job a sending them to SPAM, so I don’t have to deal with the “I’m following up with the terrible prospecting letter I sent last week with another terrible letter.” They are from sales people who are just executing poorly. Maybe they haven’t been trained, they are getting bad templates or materials. Even though they are bad letters, there are too many to single out. An in some sense, it may not be fair. […]