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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
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 […]
Experiencing What Our Customers Experience
Too often, there’s a huge disconnect between our organizations and our customers. Our customers and prospects are frustrated with us and we don’t understand the frustration. We design our engagement processes, our support systems, our communications. We create what we hope to be a great Customer Experience. Yet the customer actually experiences something else. They don’t get it, we don’t get it, there is a giant disconnect. Let me step back a couple of decades. I was heavily involved in the automotive industry at one point in my career. At the time, customers were complaining about quality of US manufactured cars. […]
Laziness Takes Too Much Time And Effort!
In several posts recently, I’ve been railing against lazy, unimaginative selling. I have to confess, I have no tolerance for laziness, and tend to be pretty hard-nosed when I see it. Pardon my venting, but I just need to let it out. Laziness is all around us, but it’s often hard to spot. Often it’s cloaked in a frenzy of busyness. We see it everyday. It’s the tired old email campaign–poorly written, poorly executed, poor follow up (If you want to see me rail, read “The Email Query.“) It’s not preparing for the sales call. After all, we’ve made 100’s […]
Building A Better “Social Business”
Recently, I had the privilege of speaking with Ed Abrams, Vice President of Marketing for IBM’s Small and Mid Sized Business Segment. Ed has some fascinating insights on how any business can more effectively engage customers in meaningful conversations. At the end of the post, be sure to listen to the interview, I learned a lot conducting it, I’m certain you will learn from listening. We covered a lot of territory in the interview–some of the highlights: We spent some time talking about what “being social” is, something I think many of us get wrong when we think about social […]
Customer Decisionmaking, Like Herding Cats
I’m the proud “father” of Sammy and Harley—that’s them in the picture. It took my wife and I 30 minutes to get them to “pose.” You can see the picture is out of focus–I had to take it quickly, Harley is ready to jump and run. Trying to get the cats, individually, to do what I want them to do really hit and miss—but getting them both to do something is……….. Well, anyone who has been around cats knows this is Mission Impossible! (Funny, how they always get me to do what they want). Working with customers is a lot like herding […]
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 […]