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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
How Will The Customer Pay For It?
I’ve written before about how many opportunities we inappropriately disqualify because the customer doesn’t have the budget. If you’d like a refresher, look at “We Don’t Have The Budget.” I’ve gotten a lot of emails on this topic and realized I needed to continue to expand on this. It’s important that we understand how the customer is going to pay for whatever they are or that we want them to buy. If we don’t understand their budgeting and funding process, so much of the time, we’re just crossing our fingers and hoping. Hope isn’t a sales strategy! We know we […]
Turning Your Value Prop Upside Down
We’re all proud of our value propositions! We feature them in our web sites, we’re trained to brag about them to our customers. Usually, when I hear people describe their company’s value proposition, the focus seems to be all about the company or the product. We provide the most advanced social selling CRM platform in the world! Our products have the highest levels of reliability of any in it’s category! We have more features and functionality than other provider of [fill in the blank] in the industry! Our price performance exceeds that of everyone in the industry! I’ll stop here, […]
Pipeline Stench
Here’s an idea for some clever software entrepreneur, add “smell” to pipeline management software. Sometimes, I really wish we could “smell” our pipelines, we would be overwhelmed by the number of dead, stagnant, rotten deals and the resultant stench. (By the way, I will insist on a royalty from anyone adding this feature to their software.) It’s amazing the number of sales people and organizations I encounter claiming to have great pipelines. I look at the pipelines, they are filled with deals. If the organization has some sort of “coverage” model, for example, 3, 5, or more, they always have the […]
Insight, Change, And Value
I’ve been writing a lot about Insight recently. In the course of the posts, I’ve gotten really outstanding and intriguing comments, both privately and publicly. Clearly Insight is important—it always has been, always will be. What we label as Insight may have evolved. We may have taught customers about products—we still do need to teach them about products, whether it’s sales people or through content we create. We may have taught them about solutions to problems they have had. We may have taught them about new ways to run their business, new opportunities, how they might improve. Those are all various […]
Insight, Co-Creation, De-commoditization
Let’s face it! When we wash away all the hyperbole, so many of our products, services and solutions have become commoditized. When I first started selling, I sold mainframe computers, today, they’re virtually commoditized. Take complex enterprise software systems, whether ERP, CRM, whatever; for all intents they’re commoditized. While proud sales people might say, “We handle the date field differently than anyone else.” it’s really very difficult to differentiate them. Maybe today’s release is a little better/richer than the alternatives, but tomorrow they stair step us. Commoditization of our offerings strikes terror into all our hearts. In a commoditized world, […]
Insight,Co-Creation, And Value
I wanted to expand on my post, Insight And Co-Creation, and much of my writing on Value Propositions/Creation. Often, I speak of the value we create in the process. It’s the most overlooked, yet the most powerful and sustainable part of our Value Proposition/Value Creation. We get a lot about Value Propositions wrong. To0 much is focused on the value our products or solutions create for the customer, or the value our companies and organizations bring to customers using our solutions. Too often, our value propositions are nothing more than glorified FABs (Features/Advantages/Benefits). Take a few minutes right now. Go […]