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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
Your Call Is Important To Us…..
I’m a current customer. I want to buy something from you, it will increase the value of our current relationship by about 50%. I just need some information before I submit an order. We can probably cover it in about 5 minutes and you will get an additional $10K+ per year. I called your customer service number. I’ve been on hold for 48 minutes and 57 seconds. Yes, I know I’m supposed to research things at your web site first. I did, but it was amazingly deficient in providing meaningful information. Perhaps other customers found the same problem, that’s why hold […]
“I Need To Hire A Rainmaker!”
A client called me up stating, “I need to hire a rainmaker.” He is the CEO of a mid sized company that’s struggling a little, and wanted my help in finding someone. Since I’ve always struggled with the concept of a rainmaker, so I asked him what he meant. He replied, “I need someone to make things happen!” He went on to describe someone who could turn around the most difficult situations, walk into a prospect and in one or two meetings inspire the customer to whip out a PO. I was tempted to ask if the candidate needed to pull […]
80% Of Our Revenue Comes From…….
Data is powerful. We’re all enamored with analytics and what they can tell us about our customers and our business. But data can also be very dangerous if we really don’t understand it. If we only look at it on a surface level, never drilling down to understand it, we can draw dangerously wrong conclusions. We’re all familiar with the Pareto Principle. Somehow, it seems virtually every piece of analysis fits the Pareto Principle (or almost). 80% of our revenue is generated by 20% of our sales people. 80% of our revenue comes from 20% of our customers, 80% of our […]
In Defense Of Transactional Buying
It’s not often I disagree with my friend, Anthony Iannarino, but he recently wrote a great post, Transactional Selling To Avoid Conflicts Around Price. I don’t really disagree with his point of view, but I think there is a different way of looking at transactional selling, or rather, transactional buying. We always tend to associate these with “priced based buying.” We tend to think the only value we can create is through pricing actions–discounting. First, price is always a key consideration whether we are involved in a complex or transactional buying/selling process. As sales professionals, we have to create sufficient value to […]
What’s Your Customer Ready To Do?
I read an interesting post last week. It focused on the importance for sales people aligning themselves with “What the customer is ready to do.” On the face of it, it made a lot of sense. It really focuses on the necessity of aligning our selling process with the customer’s buying process. At each stage of their buying process, the customer has to be ready to move to their next step. If we aren’t aligned with them acting on what they are ready to do and moving to the next step, we aren’t engaging the customer effectively. An extreme example […]
Please Do Your Homework Before Contacting Me!
As sales professionals looking for new business, it’s critical that we establish our credibility in our very first contacts with a prospect or customer. We then have to maintain that through every subsequent communication, creating value in every exchange. We all know that, but I’m amazed at how few people execute that. I get all sorts of queries–and I’m not talking about the obvious SPAM who’s sole purpose is to clog up the web. Emails asking me if we are interested in learning the latest advancements in lean manufacturing technologies, and how we can leverage them in our factories–I suppose because I write […]