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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
We Caught ‘Em, You Skin ‘Em (The Saga Between Marketing And Sales — Part 2)
In my last post, I outlined how buying has changed. I created a case for engaging our customers differently, more effectively. But what’s this mean for what marketing and sales actually do? How do we work, together, to engage our customers more effectively? Marketing and sales can no longer work separately, but must collaborate in facilitating the customer buying process. Those things we relied on in the past—strong brands, great products, competitive price/value proposition are now table stakes. Now the differentiator is the customer buying experience—how marketing and sales engages the customer together. So what does this mean to marketing […]
We Caught ‘Em, You Skin ‘Em (The Saga Between Marketing And Sales — Part 1)
We’ve all heard some variation of the same story: Two hunters are in the woods, they’re separated. All of a sudden one hunter runs by the other at top speed screaming his head off. He’s being chased by a bear. As he passes the other hunter he yells, “I caught him, you skin him!” Sometimes that seems a perfect description of the relationship between marketing and sales. Marketing spends it’s time trying to create demand—any kind of demand. They “caught the leads,” it was sales responsibility to “skin them.” But in this story, sometimes it seems marketing and sales are […]
Who Is The Customer Experience For?
The answer to this question seems obvious, the customer experience, whether it is buying, post buying, or anytime they engage our company, is for the customer. It’s the experience they should have in every interaction with our organization. When they are looking for information, how do they find it? Is it meaningful, relevant, and timely? When they engage in a buying process, do we align with how they want to buy, creating value in each step of the process? When they buy, do we support them in the ways that are helpful and responsive to them? When they don’t buy […]
Designing The Customer Experience For Our Efficiency, Not The Customers’
This afternoon, we had a problem with a critical tool that we use. I am currently on the road, running from meeting to meeting, but I had to address the problem, it was impacting our people and work they were doing. I called customer service, got a very good agent. Unfortunately, the answers she was giving me weren’t satisfactory so I asked if I could speak to a manager. She was pleased to have me do so, but couldn’t transfer me. “We don’t transfer these calls to managers, I have to send a note to a manager and someone will get […]
“I Can Save You More Than You Are Currently Spending” And Other Stupid Sales Ploys
We’ve all gotten the call, the phone rings, it’s a sales person. Somewhere in the first 5 sentences of his pitch, he says, “I can save you more than you are currently spending,” or something similar. How utterly stupid! Paraphrasing Ian Brodie, “How can you make that statement until you know what I’m doing and what I’m spending?” I’m a little more sadistic than that. Any sales person calling me with that claim, I immediately say, “That’s awesome, how do I take advantage of the deal?” The sales person gets excited, continues their pitch, I interrupt, “You’ve sold me, don’t […]
You Won’t Win With The Best Product!
Sales people are obsessed with products. We know every feature, function, feed, and speed. We know the most nuanced details of the product and how it’s used. We know the competitors, comparing each thing the competitor does with what we do—“The competitor’s only comes in black, we offer four colors……. We have endless analyses, brochures, case studies and testimonials about the superiority of our products. We have demos, benchmarks, and other tools that prove the superiority of our products. We can spew endless features, advantages, and benefits. We are prepared to pitch anything about the product at a moment’s noticed–anxiously […]