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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
If You Don’t Value Your Time, You’ll Never Value The Customer’s
In commenting on my post, Given A Choice, Customers Generally Prefer Not To Have Their Time Wasted, my friend Gary Hart struck a chord, stimulating this post. Thanks Gary! There is not a lot that we as sales professionals control. Our companies set our quotas, define our territories, give us sales and marketing programs, and help define out priorities. We can’t control the products, product quality, our pricing, or much of the customer experience. The one thing that is in our control is how we use our time. Yet, too often, I see too many sales professionals wasting time. No […]
Given A Choice, Customers Generally Prefer Not To Have Their Time Wasted
I was struck by a sentence in the CEB’s Sales Challenger Blog, “Given a choice, customers will generally engage a supplier as late as they possibly can.” They go on to say the reason is the sales person has nothing unique or valuable to contribute to the conversation. They are absolutely right. But more broadly, the issue really is, customers–most people, in fact–generally don’t like to have their time wasted! Yes, insight is an important part of creating value based conversations and engaging the customer, but it doesn’t stop there. In every interaction with the customer, we have to create value. If […]
Applying Lean Practices To Sales And Marketing
Not long ago, the folks at Openview Labs in Boston interviewed me on Lean Sales and Marketing. I thought I’d share this short video with you. (Don’t let the frightening face on the “opener” scare you away. I think it was some of their Halloween humor) Lean is really about value–how do we create and deliver the value our customers want and needs. Break this code, focus on the lean principles of value creation and delivery–and you also have great insight into maximizing the impact, effectiveness and efficiency of your sales and marketing teams. Find more of my articles on this […]
Selling Fearlessly
There are hundreds of new books on selling published every year. To be honest, not many of them offer a lot new. The better ones have some slightly new takes on very old ideas–but they provide some refreshing insights, approaches, or make you think about things a little differently. The majority, well, my Mom always said, “If you can’t say something nice…….” The problem with all these books is they tend to approach things from the ideal. “Do this exactly as I say, and it will always work.” The reality is things are seldom the ideal. Sometimes, you do everything right and […]
Is Your Sales Strategy Based On Assumptions?
The scene gets played over and over, literally hundreds of times every year. I’m sitting with a sales person or team, we’re reviewing a deal, building a strategy to win it. I’ll ask a question, it could be about the problem the customer is trying to solve, their needs and priorities, the decision-making process, the competition, how differentiated the value proposition is. It could be anything. The sale person responds. Say we’ve been talking about the decision making process and I ask who the decision maker is, the sale person says, “Erin is the key decision maker.” I follow-up, asking, […]
“Intelligent Leads”
I was recently asked to share my views of the impact of Big Data, business intelligence, and data analytics in sales. We are only beginning to scratch the surface in leveraging Big Data, particularly in sales. Many other functions have been leveraging big data and rich analytics for years, with great impact. I’ve been quoted a lot about my view that Big Data and rich analytics are the “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow” for sales and marketing. These have the greatest potential in driving both sales effectiveness, but also customer experience of anything that I’m seeing. […]