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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
DumbingThings Down Versus Radical Simplification
I’m a great advocate of Radical Simplification. Our worlds are too complex, we seem to keep piling things onto everything we’ve done in the past. New programs, new processes, new systems, new tools, new training. Layer upon layer accumulates, confusing sales people–what do I do? Which strategy should I follow, do I use this approach or another? It goes on and on…… Too often, however, in response to this complexity and all the “tools” that have been put in place to manage complexity, instead of simplification, we dumb things down. We make it so we don’t have to think, analyze, […]
Buying Is A High Risk Job!
In my post, “Solving Our Problems,” Tim Foster reminded me of something the folks at The TAS Group say, “The impact on the customer of a bad buying decision is usually greater than the impact of the lost sale to the sales person.” It’s something few of us think about, but we need to remind ourselves everyday. The risk to the customer in making a bad buying decision can be very high. The risks far exceed what they pay for the product and the revenue we might get. To the customer it might mean: A project failure. The customer is […]
Solving Our Problems
I’ve been having trouble with a sales person. He’s someone I’ve done business with a few times before. It started a few months ago. He sold my wife her last car. He knows her lease is coming to an end in July. A few months ago, he politely called me (wonder why he didn’t call my wife) asking our intentions at the end of the lease. I told him, “She loves the car, she’ll probably buy the current model at the end of her current lease. Why don’t you ask her?” He politely asked, “Would you make sure to call […]
Seeing Things Differently, Seeing Different Things
What do you see in this picture? It’s a very famous–some people see an old woman, others see a young woman. Some of you may just be able to see one image, you’ll have to ask me for clues for the other. Even though I knew there were two different images in this picture, it took me a long time to “find” the old woman (tells you where my mind is at). However hard I stared at the picture, however hard I tried to block the image of the younger woman, I really had difficulty finding the older woman. After […]
Try Selling Sand
As much as sales people try to sell solutions or sell value, too often they fall back on great products. They focus on product, features, functions, feeds and speeds. Recently, I saw a “sales playbook” from an enterprise software company. It was 121 pages, of feature by feature comparison of their product to competition, “Our date field is structured this way, which is better than the competitors………” Too often, particularly with organizations with great, hot, or complex products, our selling is really about the product and nothing else. We limit ourselves, we frustrate the customers. As great as our products […]
Questions We’re Afraid To Ask
We all have them, Questions We’re Afraid To Ask. They’re obvious, but we’re afraid to ask them. Will we offend the customer? Will they make us look stupid? Are we afraid of the answer we might get? Not asking these questions are what holds us back. Usually, they involve a root issue–not asking them holds us back. We may be chasing a bad opportunity, we may be missing something fundamental, we may be making an error, we may not be contributing in the most important way possible. Almost always, the question is obvious. It’s staring us in the face, we know it’s […]