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
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 […]
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 […]