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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
Exchanging Value
The discussions revolving around my post, Moving From Value Creation To Value Co-Creation, has gotten pretty interesting. I thought I’d expand on some of the discussions that are occurring both on and offline. We talk about creating value for our customers. It’s a critical part of winning business. But we have to remember, value is exchanged between parties. (This will start to give you a clue about the expression, “there is no such thing as a free lunch.”) Value exchange was pretty easy to understand in the “old days.” We provided products and services that had a value proposition. Presumably, […]
What’s Quality Have To Do With Sales And Marketing?
Quality is a word I almost never hear in a discussion about selling. Sure, sometimes we sell the quality of our products and selling, but I almost never hear the discussion of quality in selling or marketing. It’s a sharp contrast to discussions I have with manufacturing, engineering, development, and even financial executives. Quality is an ingrained part of everything they do (at least in high performing organizations). When I ask sales and marketing executives about this, usually the answer is “We’re different.” Sometimes, it’s amplified, “Our work flow and processes need to be flexible and change with the customer,” or […]
Connecting The Dots, Can You Do It For Your Customer?
There’s a huge amount of “wisdom” about calling at the top. At times, I think we have to change corporate structures, naming far more C-Level executives just to accommodate the clamor of sales people needing to call at the top. Don’t get me wrong, we have to engage al levels that are appropriate for the solutions we present. But calling at the top for everything is just a foolish strategy. It wastes our time, it wastes customer time (those we really need to be working with) and it wastes executive time. It’s natural for us to inflate the importance of […]
Are You Prepared To Have A Customer-Specfic Conversation?
Insight is the word of the year. We are all being trained in providing insight–ideas about the customer’s business; how they might grow, opportunities they might be missing, how they might improve, how they might achieve their dreams and goals more effectively. If, we’ve done it correctly, we get the customer interested and the conversation begins. The conversation is the most important–and perhaps the most difficult. In order to maximize our value creation and our success, we need to get “up-close and personal.” Our conversation has to move through a number of levels–each of which requiring great knowledge. Regardless of […]
Creating Social Business Success
Every week, I would venture there are over 100 blog posts or articles talking about Social Business. Too often, the focus seems to be about how business should leverage technology to more effectively reach customers. But, Vala Afshar, CMO and CCO for Enterasys, would point out, Social is a mind set. When you talk about “being social” with Vala, phrases like: Nothing’s more important than the customer. Collaboration is critical, it’s messy, but you can’t be social without collaboration–between people in your organization, with your customers, and your community. Social business demands share accountability. Without share values, you can’t be […]
MOVE Or Die!
Imagine, you are in the middle of a road, a car is hurtling at 60 miles per hour (100 kph) directly at you. It’s making no attempt to stop. The answer is pretty obvious, almost instinctual, you MOVE. You know if you don’t, you will certainly be hit and die. The action we must take is obvious, it’s instinctual, we take action instinctually. Our innate drive to survive causes us to move. Yet in business, every day we are faced with thing hurtling toward us—changing customer buying patterns, changing competition, changing business conditions. Yet we don’t move, we don’t change. […]