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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
They Aren’t The Enemy, They’re Our Customers!
We all know the saying, “Things would be great if it weren’t for those damned customers!” It’s said in jest, but sometimes I get the feeling there is more truth than many would like to admit. We walk into a store, try to get help, finally get someone who makes us feel like it’s such an imposition to take our money. We call customer service, get transferred from agent to agent–seems no one really wants to help us solve the problem, until we get someone who sigh’s audibly, sounds tremendously put out and asks what our problem is. Unfortunately, we […]
Do You Really Understand Your Customer’s Goals?
As sales people we are trained to do needs analysis. We have questioning guides to help us determine customer needs. Often, those are focused on identifying the needs that we address best. Sometimes our questioning strategies go deeper, we try to prioritize, qualify, and quantify the needs. This is critical, it helps us understand the sense of urgency or pain, as well as providing a basis for justifying our solutions. But too often, we miss the real goals that drive the customer. The real needs they want to address. We need to understand their goals! Yeah, I know a lot of you think this […]
It’s Supposed To Be A Pipeline, Not a Pipe Dream!
Every sales professional knows the importance of keeping a full pipeline. If they don’t, their managers remind them of it every pipeline review. But if we are keeping full pipelines, why do only 53% of sales people make their quotas? Something’s wrong. I get to see the pipelines of dozens of organizations and hundreds of sales people every year. After only about 15 minutes of review, too often what I see is a pipe dream, not a pipeline. The signs are easy: Deals that have been in the pipeline too long. You’ve seen them, your average sales cycle is 90 […]
Our People Are Not Commodities, They Are Our Differentiation!
Unfortunately, too often the people in organizations are treated as commodities. People are swapped out, new one’s are swapped in, they are ignored and not recognized. In reality, people are the most sustainable differentiators in any organization. See, people can’t be copied or duplicated. It’s easy to copy or mimic a business strategy (though it’s impossible to be a leader by doing so). It’s easy to copy processes, or imitate product strategies. It’s difficult to be a leader by following or mimicking the leader, but you can actually get to be pretty big as a number 2 or 3. But what sets leaders apart are the way […]
Social Networking, Reciprocity, and Hypocrisy
I’ve always approached networking and social networking from the point of view of trying to build genuine relationships, trying to create value for people without a condition of reciprocity. For example, I tweet things I think are really interesting and may be interesting to my followers. I don’t do it with the expectation that someone might tweet my stuff. I “follow” people that I think have interesting views and hope that people follow me for the same reasons. But sometimes this means that I don’t follow everyone that follows me. It’s interesting to see my twitter followers go up and down. Clearly, a […]
Forensic Prospecting
Forensic Prospecting—I wish I could claim inventing this term, but the words popped out of the mouth of a client as we were discussing prospecting approaches. There’s an untapped gold mine of prospects that sales people overlook or take for granted. These are customers that have done business with us in the past—as far back as we can possibly imagine. We lose contact with too many customers–organizations and individuals, yet they represent a tremendous source of business to us. Many years ago, we undertook a series of surveys with about 10 clients–across a spectrum of industries. We looked at all the customers […]