Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Mobility, Life And Work Recreated
Mobility is changing the way we work and live! As a preface to this article, I’m excited to announce the launch to the 21st Century Sales Warrior Guide To Mobility. It’s been a collaborative efforts from thought leaders I hold in the highest regard, including Matt Heinz, Bob Apollo, Bob Thompson, the Aberdeen Group–led by Peter Ostrow. The guide contains thought leadership pieces, market research, video’s, infographics, and other materials. Our hope is that it helps you crystallize your thinking about mobility, what it means to your and your organizations! I’m grateful to SAP for sponsoring this outstanding piece. You can download […]
Stop Worrying About The Questions Your Customers Are Asking!
Don’t get me wrong, you have to be responsive to your customers. You have to provide compelling and meaningful answers to their questions. But even your best responses to their questions are not likely to be sufficient to differentiate you and win. In today’s very tough B2B sales world, it’s very difficult to differentiate our offerings from those of the competition. Tough competitors are always very close in features, functions, capabilities, even pricing. The quality of products, the reputations of the companies are very similar. There are small nuances or differences, but they are rarely the deal winners. So your customers is […]
Factors For Global Expansion Success
I started this series for OpenView Labs with a post, When Should You Consider Global Expansion? This continues with a discussion of some of the most important steps in preparing and executing your plan to expand globally. Visit OpenView’s site for the original post: Factors For Global Expansion Success.
Insight And Challenging Without Outcomes Is Just Dreaming
Our customers want insights–they want to learn more about what they could achieve, how they can improve, why they might change! In my experience, this has always been critical to engaging customers. Today, it’s just as critical, perhaps more so, because if we aren’t providing it, they can find it elsewhere. But Insight and Challenging the customer to think differently is not the goal, it’s only the beginning. Insight helps the customer to understand new possibilities and should instigate change. But that’s just the starting point. The goal, as it is in any selling or buying situation is to help […]
Insight Doesn’t Have To Be About Solving World Hunger
I had a fascinating conversation with a sales executive today. His team was inspired by Challenger and Insight selling, as so many of us are. They had gone through the training and were ready to start providing insights to their customers, transforming the customer engagement process, intercepting the customer before they had even recognized they have a problem or opportunity. After he went through the background, he then said, “We’re ready, we’re confident we can engage the customer in a different way, but we’re just struggling with coming up with meaningful insights to share with our customers.” I’ve heard others […]
We’ve Succeeded When We Stop Talking About…….
A number of years ago, I was working with a team of executives implementing some major changes to the organization and they way they worked. Previously, the team had attempted this change a couple of times and failed. Through the period of time, there had been constant reviews and discussions at all levels about what was happening and why things weren’t working. This time around, I asked the team, “How will you know you’ve succeeded this time?” We had a number of metrics in place, but we were looking for other indicators that people were buying in. After a bit of […]