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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
Knowing More Than Our Customers
I get disturbed by much of the hyperbole around Insight Selling and Teaching Our Customers. We are supposed to know more than our customers. I think in many cases that’s true and an important part of value creation. Certainly, we know more about our products and solutions–but that is probably meaningless to the customer until very late in their buying process. Unfortunately, too often, that’s all we know. Consequently, we provide very little value to our customers since they can get the same “teaching” from numerous other sources. We should know more than our customers on certain types of problems—the […]
The Essence Of Selling
A thoughtful commenter recently started a comment with, “The essence of selling………..” I didn’t completely agree with the comment, but it got me to thinking about the “essence of selling.” I’m not sure I have a great answer, but let me think out loud. Is it building relationships? Relationships are important in selling, but is that the essence of it–is that why we sell? I have relationships with lots of people who I never want to sell anything to. Is it helping the customer? We want to be helpful, we want customers to like us, but we aren’t a charity or […]
What Is Your Customer Trying To Achieve?
Too often, both we and our customers get so caught up in activities that we lose sight of what we are trying to achieve. A few weeks ago, I was participating in a deal review. It was a huge software deal, the customer was evaluating new systems to replace something that had been in place for a long time and was, apparently, no longer serving them. As I listened to the review, there was lots of discussion about the requirements, what the customer was looking for, the competition, activities that had taken place, ideas about next steps, the decision-making process, […]
“Problem Talking” Is Not “Problem Solving”
As sales people, we build the greatest value for our customers by helping them solve problems. Stated differently, customers value sales people who are problem solvers. However, too often, I encounter sales people who think they are problem solvers, when really they are problem talkers. There’s a huge difference. We know what problems our products and solutions solve. We can talk to the customer endlessly about the problem and our solution. “You have a problem nurturing your customers, providing relevant content, at the right time, developing their interest until they express an interest in buying. Our marketing automation platform helps […]
Shifting Our Perspectives
Sometimes I talk to frustrated sales people, “All you say is we’ve got to give the customers Insight, we have to focus on solving their problems. But my manager is beating me up on what I’m selling! How can I spend time solving the customers’ problems if I’m not selling our products and services?” It’s a great concern! Our job is to sell our products and solutions. It is to create and grow the revenue for our companies. We can’t lose focus on that. The real issue, however, is “Are we focusing on customers who have the problems we can solve?” […]
Knowing Where Our Customers Live
Too often, our problem as professional sales or marketing people is that we think like professional sales and marketing people. “Duh, Dave….thanks for sharing……” We see things from our perspectives. We’ve got great ideas and insights, we’re anxious to demonstrate our knowledge and prowess to the customer. We’re really enthusiastic about our products and solutions, we just know the value that customers can get from them! We’ve got our jobs to do, things to achieve. We see all sorts of opportunities for our customers, we want to help them achieve their goals and grow. All this is great. The best […]