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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
What Do Your Customers Do?
As sales professionals, we’re supposed to really understand our customers-their markets, industries, businesses, functions–and their jobs. It’s critical in engaging them in discussions about the things the care about. It’s critical to be able to relate to them on their terms so we are credible and can build a trusted relationship. So it’s easy to say that. If we’re lucky, marketing has provided us a lot of content and tools to help us better understand. We may have training on the industries and markets. We may have various “personas” that help us understand the roles of the people we call […]
Complicated Things Versus Complicating Things
Without a doubt, our personal and business worlds are complicated–and getting more so. We’re pressed from all sides with shifting priorities, new problems, too little time, too much information. We struggle to cope and manage. We seek solutions to address the complexity. Usually, our approach is to further complicate things. We look for quick fixes, we provide patches, Band-Aids. We seldom look to Simplify–it seems too complicated. Simplification is not easy. To simplify we have to really understand what we are trying to do. We have to understand what’s standing in the way of what we are trying to achieve. […]
Are You Worth Your Customer’s Time?
As sales people, we are always concerned with out time. We can’t afford to waste our time, we can’t afford to have customers waste our time. We constantly assess things to determine whether they are worth our time. Our customers do the same. Customers are busy, they have too much on their plates and too few resources to accomplish what they want. Consequently, they are time poor. Yet, too often we ignore that. We call blindly, interrupting their day–usually to read some scripted pitch that says, “Buy my product.” Or we drop in for check up or “Howdy” calls. Or […]
Belief And Confidence, Critical For Sales Success
To be successful as sales professionals we have to believe in ourselves. We have to have confidence in working with our customers, in our abilities to bring value to and influence our customers. We have to believe in our products. If we don’t believe in our products, we can never present them with confidence or credibility. We can never defend our solutions in the face of competition. Likewise, we have to believe in our companies. We have to know our companies will support us. That our companies will deliver on the commitments we make to our customers. That our companies […]
“Procurement Needs To Bring More To The Table Than Discounts”
I can hear the cheers already, every sales professional reading this will probably forward it to their favorite–or not so favorite procurement professional. I took this from Remko Van Hoek’s HBR post on The Trouble With Procurement. There is a quiet revolution happening–something that too few sales people are aware of, something that too few of us are helping to provide value. Professional procurement is changing radically. Professional procurement executives are no longer those guys whose only job is to beat sales people down for price and ensure contract compliance. Professional procurement is taking a strategic position in the “C-Suite.” […]
Is Added Value Really Value Add?
Added Value has always been an important idea in at least my sales career. It was always drilled into me to articulate and claim our added value. While we were supposed to be more sophisticated, it was kind of like, “Here are all the things you didn’t ask for that we are providing you in our solution.” Somehow those “extras” were supposed to get the customer to buy–whether it was to choose us, pay a little more, whatever. Added value was a very key part of the sales strategy. But, I’m rethinking this whole concept of Added Value. Is Added Value Really […]