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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
“Problem Talking” Is Not “Problem Solving”
As sales people, we build the greatest value for our customers by helping them solve problems. Stated differently, customers value sales people who are problem solvers. However, too often, I encounter sales people who think they are problem solvers, when really they are problem talkers. There’s a huge difference. We know what problems our products and solutions solve. We can talk to the customer endlessly about the problem and our solution. “You have a problem nurturing your customers, providing relevant content, at the right time, developing their interest until they express an interest in buying. Our marketing automation platform helps […]
Shifting Our Perspectives
Sometimes I talk to frustrated sales people, “All you say is we’ve got to give the customers Insight, we have to focus on solving their problems. But my manager is beating me up on what I’m selling! How can I spend time solving the customers’ problems if I’m not selling our products and services?” It’s a great concern! Our job is to sell our products and solutions. It is to create and grow the revenue for our companies. We can’t lose focus on that. The real issue, however, is “Are we focusing on customers who have the problems we can solve?” […]
Knowing Where Our Customers Live
Too often, our problem as professional sales or marketing people is that we think like professional sales and marketing people. “Duh, Dave….thanks for sharing……” We see things from our perspectives. We’ve got great ideas and insights, we’re anxious to demonstrate our knowledge and prowess to the customer. We’re really enthusiastic about our products and solutions, we just know the value that customers can get from them! We’ve got our jobs to do, things to achieve. We see all sorts of opportunities for our customers, we want to help them achieve their goals and grow. All this is great. The best […]
The Helpful Sales Person
We want to establish relationships with our customers. We want to be helpful. But sometimes being helpful isn’t helpful–to us in achieving our objectives and to the customer in achieving theirs. Our customers are very busy. They have too much on their plates, they get diverted. So we try to be helpful, in order to move things along. We start doing things for the customer. Sometimes being helpful is helpful. We may be able to get some things done faster or more effectively than the customer. We may take some of the tedious stuff they have to do in their […]
Can Insight Become Commoditized?
Forgive me for thinking out loud. Insight–selling with Insight is what everyone is talking about these days. It’s an interesting bandwagon, there’s money to be made, so everyone’s trying their own approach. In my mind, I fast forward a number of years. What happens when every sales person brings Insight to the customer? What happens when every sales person is coming to the customer with ideas for growing and improving their businesses? Is it possible that Insight might become commoditized? As I thought about it, I realized the real winner in this imaginary world is the customer. Imagine sales people […]
Creating Discomfort
My friend, Tim Ohai, wrote a brilliant guest post today: Cooperation Is For Losers. While the entire post is great, one sentence struck me, “You have to be disruptive to the point of discomfort……” That sentence probably makes many of you uncomfortable, it runs counter to what so many opinions we may have about selling. We want to build relationships, we want the customer to trust us, we don’t want to rock the boat…… But having a “comfortable” customer is the worst thing possible for sales. If the customer is experiencing no discomfort, they have no reason to change, no […]