Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Shared Objectives And Goals
As sales and business professionals, we’re intensely goal driven. We’re driven to attain and achieve, we want to win, we want to achieve our goals. At its most base form, our goals are to sell our products and services to make our numbers. Likewise our customers are goal driven. They have their numbers and goals to achieve. Whether it’s developing a new product, improving manufacturing, improving operational efficiency, improving market share, improving the top or bottom lines, or anything else. As sales people, too often the way we achieve our goals is totally incompatible with the customer’s interests and goals. […]
Is Your Customer Prepared For Your Sales Call?
Richard Ruff wrote a great article on Sales Call Planning, it provoked me to extend the discussion–with a twist. We know sales call planning is important. We want to make we are prepared, we want to be sure we achieve our goals, we want to move the customer through their buying process, we want to make sure we create value in each call. As a side note, we know these things are critical, but I’m amazed by the number of sales people who continue to “wing it” in sales calls. But effective sales calls and meetings are a two way […]
What’s Your Situational Awareness?
Talk to anyone in the military about tactics, a topic that comes up very quickly is situational awareness. There are a lot of technical definitions, but in it’s simplest form, situational awareness is about “paying attention to what’s happening around you.” As a consultant, I have the opportunity to observe a lot of things that happen. I go on calls with sales people, listen in on phone calls, sit in all sorts of meetings–team meetings, reviews, coaching sessions, and other things. I’m constantly amazed at how bad most of us are in “situational awareness.” It may be the fidgeting customer, […]
Leveraging “Lighthouse Customers” For Insight
Do you have “Lighthouse Customers?” Lighthouse Customers are critical for every organization. They are organizations in which we have very close relationships. They are important to our business, not necessarily for their business volume—more on that later. We are important to their business. Lighthouse customers give us the opportunity to really learn. They help us develop new products and solutions. While we try to learn as much as we can about the evolving needs of a large number of our customers, there are a small number with whom we have deep relationships. Customers we use as sounding boards for thinking […]
Does Your Customer Understand Your Differentiation?
I’m often amazed by the discussions–or absence of discussions on differentiation. In order to win, we have to differentiate our solutions, but we have to differentiate them in the areas the customer cares about. Most of the time, it’s long lists of features, comparing our solutions to the competition–with the goal being more boxes checked in our column than the competitors.’ We overwhelm and confuse customers with long lists of features, benefits, and whatever we can. But when we differentiate ourselves, it’s critical to focus on what the customer cares about. Everything else is meaningless–in fact wastes the customer’s time. […]
It’s Not About The Form/Template
The other day I wrote, “It’s Account Planning Season” again. Commenting on the post, Tamara Schenk reminded me the value of account planning–or any planning we do–is less in completing the plan itself but really all about the process. Tamara makes a tremendous point that seems to be too often lost on managers and sales people alike. Everywhere I go, we may be talking about opportunity planning/deal strategies, call planning, account/territory planning, even pipeline management; I see two parallel things at play: Managers are concerned about the completion of the plan! They want to see the form, template, or the […]