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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
Do We Really Understand Value?
My recent posts, “But Your Price Is Too High,” and “Price Is Meaningless Until You Establish Business Value,” have stimulate heated discussions and debates on LinkedIn and other venues. What’s struck me is we still have very fundamental misunderstandings of value, value propositions, and how we understand, create, communicate and deliver value to our customers. While I’ve written about these issues a lot before, I thought it might be useful to recap and summarize many of the key issues around value. I won’t go to the depth I have in individual posts (just search under Value Proposition) and you can […]
“But Your Price Is Too High”
It’s the customer’s moral and business obligation to always challenge you with, “But Your Price Is Too High.” This isn’t a problem or issue. What is the problem, is the mindless response from sales people, immediately offering a lower price. Or even worse, anticipating the objection, discounting in advance–it doesn’t preempt the objection, it just means you have to discount further. For an objection that happens in every single sale, you would think sales people would be so much better at handling it, but the most common response is a discount, without any understanding of what’s needed or why or […]
You’re Making The Number, But Are You Achieving Your Potential
I’m an unapologetic believer in the concept, “It’s your God-given right to 100% share of customer and 100% share of territory.” Everything I’ve been taught, everything I’ve taught or coached has been around maximizing the full potential in the “territory.” While it’s impossible to achieve, this mind-set totally reshapes the way one thinks of opportunities, growth, and success. It reshapes the way you approach and engage your customers. Whether at an individual or organizational level, we must always strive to maximize our ability to achieve the full potential. So, I frequently become frustrated in conversations with sales executives and people who focus on […]
Price Is Meaningless Until You Establish Business Value
This afternoon, I was speaking with a salesperson for a start-up company. We were discussing one of the biggest deals they had ever gone after, both he and the company really needed this deal. Unfortunately, he was showing me the closing presentation after he had presented it to the customer. Two charts caught my eye. The first was the final chart–the deal chart. It started with the normal list price of the service being offered, then there were some other numbers culminating in a “Special Offer” that was 80% off the normal pricing of the offering! Yes, straight out of […]
Sales Forecast Accuracy, Demand Planning And Other Ramblings
I’ve been involved in a number of conversations about my positions on Sales Forecast Accuracy recently. I wanted to share some thoughts provoked by those very good conversations. The Sales Forecast Is Not The Demand Plan! The demand plan is the basis for scheduling manufacturing (or service delivery). It ripples through the manufacturing schedule, inventory planning, shipping, procurement, supply chain management. Ultimately it impacts cash flow and revenue/expense forecasting. The demand plan is critical, but it’s not Sales responsibility. The Sales Forecast is an important component of the demand plan, so forecast accuracy is important. But it is only a component. Many […]
Going Beyond Cost – Benefit Analysis
A critical element of any high impact sales process is “creating business justified solutions.” I’d venture a guess that fewer than 20% of the deals I review have even the most rudimentary business and financial justification. For too many, sales people provide a price, and maybe a list of features and benefits that might be translated to business value–but we encumber the customer with the job of justifying the solution themselves. Everyday, I read blog post after blog post about dealing with “discounting and price shoppers.” Questions about pricing and discounting dominated discussion groups (probably second to finding qualified prospects). […]