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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
“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 […]
Do You Really Know Your Sweet Spot?
Maximizing sales success, market penetration, and growth requires knowing your “sweet spot.” The sweet spot is that set of customers having problems that we are the best in the world at solving. These customers are likely to be our best, most loyal, and most profitable customers. The biggest drain on sales performance is selling outside the sweet spot—trying to get customers whose problems we aren’t the best in the world at solving to buy. It takes tremendous effort to win them—if you can, then it takes tremendous effort, resources, and cost to keep them and to attempt to make them happy. But […]
Insight Is Not The End, It’s The Beginning
There has been so much good discussion on Insight over the past few years. Everyone tends to have a different point of view–or twists what Insight is to support their own point of view (and I am probably guilty of that). But in reading a lot of the discussions, I get a feeling that Insight is becoming the destination. If we, sales people, just had the right Insights, pitched/messaged the right way to the right customer, we’d have the answer to ever B2B sales person’s dream—the one call close. If we give the right teaching pitch, the customer will immediately […]
What Do Reductionism And Machine Design Have To Do With Selling And Buying?
It’s probably hard to conceive of a sales guy, like me, using a multi-syllabic word like Reductionism. But my friend Charlie Green wrote a brilliant post, “The Number One Mental Illness In Business.” While it wasn’t the focus of the post, he talked a lot about Reductionism. That concept caused a bunch of things to come together in my mind. I had to go to the dictionary on Reductionism: 1. The theory that every complex phenomenon can be explained by analyzing the simplest, most basic physical mechanisms that are in operation during that phenomenon. 2. The practice of oversimplifying a […]
Knowing More Than Our Customers
I get disturbed by much of the hyperbole around Insight Selling and Teaching Our Customers. We are supposed to know more than our customers. I think in many cases that’s true and an important part of value creation. Certainly, we know more about our products and solutions–but that is probably meaningless to the customer until very late in their buying process. Unfortunately, too often, that’s all we know. Consequently, we provide very little value to our customers since they can get the same “teaching” from numerous other sources. We should know more than our customers on certain types of problems—the […]