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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
Hearing What We Want To Hear
One of the biggest errors any of us can make is Hearing What We Want To Hear. Most of the time it’s totally unconscious, we don’t realize what we are doing. As sales people, we want to engage the customer, we want to qualify the opportunity, we want to win the deal. We’re taught to probe and question. However, too often, those questions elicit only the thing we want to hear but not the real view, attitudes, or even needs of the customer. So we engage them in discussions about their business. We uncover dreams and opportunities. We discover challenges. […]
Why We Do What We Do
It’s so easy to lose sight of our goals and what we are trying to achieve. We start with great intentions, then we lose our direction. We start to focus on the wrong things: What’s our sales process? Our sales process is important, but why do we have a sales process in the first place? What’s our call plan? What’s our pipeline, what’s the forecast? What’s our deal strategy or our account plan? What are our marketing programs? And we can go on. The “What” questions also generate the “How” questions—How do we execute our sales process? How do we […]
Who Cares About “Outstanding Customer Service Experience?”
Sometimes, I think we get customer service wrong. We try to create outstanding experiences. We survey people about the experience and how it can be improved. We sell the value of our outstanding customer service. Frankly, to me, the very best customer service experience is to have no customer service experience at all! Not having the need to engage customer service, in the first place, makes me more satisfied with the product or service I’ve bought than the most sophisticated customer service process in the world. Let me explain myself. To put in a customer service request, whether through the web […]
80/20 Management
All of us like to fit all sorts of principles and examples into Pareto’s Law. In many cases these are relevant and great examples. There are dozens of articles on leadership and coaching which apply the 80/20 principle. Everyone seems to have a different 80/20 depending on what they are talking about. Much of it may be valid, but too often I think many of these articles miss the real point. As managers, we are expected to lead, manage, and coach all our people–not just some of them. Our job is to maximize the performance of each person in our […]
“How Much Does It Hurt?”
I was in the doctor’s office for a check up the other day and was fascinated with the “Pain Chart” on his examining room wall. It was one of those simple things doctors use to help patients describe the magnitude of pain they are experiencing. I’m sure you’ve seen them, typically a 0-10 scale ranging from “Ouch,” to “PUT ME OUT OF MY MISERY!” My doctor explained the chart to me. He said that it’s really difficult to get people to describe their pain. They can describe where it is, they can describe a little bit of the nature of […]
The “Squishy” Buying Cycle
Too often, we think of the customer’s buying process as something that, once we understand it, is fairly structured and defined. Our job as sales professionals becomes aligning our selling process with the customer’s buying process, moving through the process in a disciplined manner. I think there is a different view of the buying cycle, one that is more “squishy.” Hank Barnes of Gartner, has an interesting concept of the buying cycle being a series of “activity streams,” each going at various speeds. These streams are constantly working–but with differing levels of focus and activity. The outcome of these buying […]