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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
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 […]
10,000 Hours To Mastery — Or A Good Start
I’m a real fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. One of the most impactful parts of the book is the discussion around what it takes to achieve real mastery of something. Whether you are an orchestral musician, a world class athlete, a high performing doctor, or a sales professional—it takes a minimum of 10,000 hours to achieve mastery. Give me a number, it’s something I have to achieve. It’s like quota, I immediately thought, “Have I achieved mastery yet?” Where am I on the 10,000 hour scale? How much longer do I have to go? Quickly, I pulled out a calculator. […]
“How Much Does That Cost?”
A natural question customers always ask is, “How much does that cost?” Unfortunately, too often sales people answer incorrectly, responding with, “The price is……….” Cost and price are very different! If we answer with our price, we’ve immediately transformed the conversation into a pricing discussion. The end of this conversation is always the level of discount you’ve provided. We totally miss the opportunity to really talk about costs when we shift the conversation to pricing. “How much does that cost”” It’s a different question, with a whole range of different answers. We can use these answers to transform the discussion […]
Walking Away
My post, “But Your Price Is Too High,” has spawned dozens of comments. One of the themes that has come up is “Walking Away.” We all know we are supposed to do it, but walking away is something we rarely do. It’s really not that simple to just walk away. We’re supposed to walk away from bad deals, whether it’s because of pricing or other issues. But it’s far easier said than done. As we work deals through the pipeline, we become emotionally committed to them. We’ve invested so much time, so much resource, we often fool ourselves. We believe […]
Do You Understand Your Differentiation, Does Your Customer?
Over the past few weeks, I’ve written a number of posts about Value Propositions and Pricing. They’ve generated a lot of conversation in various venues. One of the things that’s struck me is the lack of discussion on differentiation. I think it’s an area too many of us assume the customer understands, or we simply fail to demonstrate. To capture the customer’s attention and compete, we know we have to have a powerful value proposition–expressed in terms of what the customer values. We know that we have to provide powerful business justification, aligned with the financial and strategic objectives of the […]
CRM And Oysters
I’m at Gerhard Gschwandtner’s and Selling Power’s Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. If you haven’t been to one of Gerhard’s conferences, you are missing a real opportunity to learn. Not only are Gerhard’s observations about selling provocative and insightful, but he puts together an agenda of fascinating discussions about sales and leveraging technology. As I listened to all the presenters and discussions yesterday, it struck me that CRM is becoming a lot like oysters. That probably takes a little explanation. Years ago, I started eating oysters on the half shell. I consumed trays full of them. Like probably 90% of people […]