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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
The Ability To “Figure It Out”
There’s a great article in the Harvard Business Review, “Figure It Out.” Be sure to get a copy of it. The ability to “Figure Things Out,” is critical for sales and business success. But it seems we overlook it, or try to “engineer” all our support systems around providing all the answers and direction. We create sales automatons that can follow a process, that can learn a pitch, that can leverage the tools. As I read articles about critical characteristics for sales people, I never see “the ability to figure things out” as a recruiting characteristic or something we […]
Insight Is All About Having A Point Of View
Insight is all about having a point of view, but too often I see sales people who don’t have one or who are afraid to express it to the customer. Having an opinion or point of view is the starting point for maximizing your value creation for customers — and your own personal sales success. So often, when I speak with executives, managers, and sales people about the importance of an opinion or a point of view, there is real fear. “What if I’m wrong?” “What if the customer disagrees?” “What if they don’t care?” They’re worried about looking bad […]
Good News, We Won! Bad News, We Won!
Over the past few weeks, I’ve published a number of posts on pricing, value creation, walking away. They’ve stimulated some interesting comments and discussion. As I’ve read many of the comments, it struck me that we need to talk about whether we really want to chase after every opportunity. Too often, we’re driven to win business–at any cost! We chase deals, get emotionally attached to them, are desperate to close them because we need them badly. We end up discounting, to painfully thin margins, sometimes entering into unprofitable deals. We do everything we can do get business–any business–even bad business. […]
Customer Retention, Whose Job Is It Anyway?
I wrote, Customer Retention-Different Approaches, the other day. It stimulated a lot of discussions. One of the most interesting was with my friend Brian MacIver. He reminded me of the terrible difficulty sales people have in retaining and growing business with existing customers, as well as the absence of customer retention strategies in many organizations. We hold sales responsible for customer retention. We may measure them on retention, we may have goals for growing the business with our existing customers through cross sell, upsell, expanding our relationships. Account planning is a key element of virtually every organization’s sales strategies. But sales […]
Mass Customization, Creating “Markets Of 1”
In 1999, Joe Pine published a fascinating book, Mass Customization. It focused on transforming manufacturing, moving from mass produced products sold to mass markets, to more focused products manufactured for smaller markets-ultimately for individuals. In manufacturing, there is the concept of “lot size.” Essentially, that’s the quantity manufactured in a certain run. Products with exactly the same features–same color, same options are grouped together into a single lot and manufactured together, creating greater manufacturing efficiency. The line doesn’t have to be reconfigured since each product is exactly the same. The number produced in each run determined the lot size. Manufacturing […]
Customer Retention, Different Approaches
Customer retention is a critical issue. Wisdom (and data–thought it’s not at my fingertips) says that it costs us less to keep a good customer than to acquire a new customer. But it seems companies take two different approaches to customer retention. It seems the alternative strategies center around “Keep them from leaving,” or “Let’s make them want to stay.” They sound the same, but they are really quite different–and produce very different outcomes. Unfortunately, too many companies seem to adopt the “Keep them from leaving” approach. The mentality underlying that approach isn’t concerned with customer experience, or even with customer […]