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
“I Don’t Want To Listen, I Have A Great Deal For You!”
Just when I think I’ve gotten the worst possible cold prospecting call and that nothing else could be worse, some sales person proves me wrong. Today, I got a call from someone selling “promotional items.” I answered the phone and get this over the top with enthusiasm greeting. I had to hold the phone 6 inches from my ear as he shouted the introduction. He referred to our speaking previously and of my having expressed interest in his products. I wedged my way into the conversation, “I don’t recall every speaking to you. We don’t buy promotional items as part […]
Letting Our Customers Help Solve Our Problems
Upon reading the title of this post, some of you are probably thinking, “Dave, don’t you have it backwards, aren’t we supposed help the customer solve their problems?” Well, yes, absolutely! We are supposed to help our customers identify and address their problems. We want to help them see new opportunities, we want to help them achieve their goals, improve their operations, reach new customers. But at the same time, our customers can be very helpful in solving some of our most critical problems, specifically: How do we most effectively and impactfully engage and work with them? How should we […]
Just Because We Have The Ability To Do Something Doesn’t Mean It’s Best Practice
I’ve been writing about customer experience, bad prospecting, and other bad sales and marketing practices for some time. I continue to be amazed by the ever increasing volume of bad practice—from both the naïve and from those who should know so much better. Technology enables us to do wonderful things. In can dramatically increase our productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency. We can do things faster and in higher volumes than we have ever done before. We can dramatically reduce the costs and of our content development/delivery, marketing, demand gen, marketing programs. We can customize everything–though we seldom to. Technology not only […]
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 […]