Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Competing For Mindshare Or Meaningshare
Mindshare is top of mind(so to speak) in most marketing and sales conversations. How do we capture the hearts, minds and imaginations of customers? We want to capture mindshare with consumers. Creativity in commercials, advertising, leveraging social platforms, increasing volume (figuratively and literally) all aimed at getting the attention of the consumer. We want to capture mindshare of corporate buyers. We race to create more content to have more to share with them. We diversify channels of communication, we leverage every tool or technology we can, we increase volume to capture the attention of the business buyer. There is lots […]
Selling Processes And Rube Goldberg
Rube Goldberg was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, sculptor, and author. He was famous for inventing machines that took the most simple tasks and made them insanely complex. Sometimes, when I look at what we do to ourselves in Sales and Marketing, I wonder if we aren’t creating Rube Goldberg machines. Whether a strategy to close a deal, the selling process itself, our commission plans, our go to market programs, the latest cool, sales or marketing program……. Sometimes, it seems we take what should be so simple–finding customers who have problems we can solve and helping them solve them and […]
The Email Query
I get these every day. “Hi Dave, I just wanted to follow up to see if you received my last email? In case you did not, I’ve included it below. Let me know if you’d like to jump on a quick 10-15 minute call to discuss. Have a great day!” It was signed by the sales person and the original email was attached. I responded: “Yes, I received your last email. My lack of response should be an indicator of my total lack of interest.” Why do sales people do such stupid things? Why are they trained to do such […]
Complexity Is Just An Excuse
There is no question, our worlds are very complex. The challenges our customers face are complex. The challenges we face within our organizations are complex. The challenges in engaging our customers and trying to solve their problems are complex. Complexity is a reality! We’re surrounded by, enmeshed in and consumed by complexity. Sometimes, I think we revel in complexity, “Real men (and women) do complex stuff! It takes a tough man (and woman) to solve tough problems! Simplicity is for weenies!” But then someone comes along and disrupts all of that. It’s a hot start-up, someone with a new idea. […]
Solution Provider Or Problem Solver?
As sales people, we are supposed to provide solutions to our customers problems. We either lead with Insight, making customers aware of opportunities/problems and incenting them to change; or we find a customer that knows they have a problem and is looking to solve it. At some point, we present the customer a solution to their problem–hopefully they accept ours, implement it, and we’re all happy. But that doesn’t mean we’re problem solvers! I was suddenly struck by this in reading Tim Ohai’s post, I Can’t Say It Any Plainer: SOLVE the @$%! PROBLEM! I think we confuse proposing and providing […]
Our Success Is Based On The Misery Of Our Customers!
OK, maybe misery is too dramatic, but at its core, unless our customers are “miserable” we will never be successful in selling them. This morning I was having a conversation with a sales person in a healthcare related company. We were discussing his sales strategies, value propositions, and how to get customers to buy. Finally, possibly in frustration, I blurted out, “Your services create value for people in misery. If they aren’t in misery, you’re wasting your time and their time.” In hindsight, I felt a little like Gordon Gecko declaring “Misery is good!” As crass as it sounds, all […]