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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
“Congratulations, You Are Now Part Of Our Strategic Account Program”
Whether we call them strategic accounts, global accounts, key accounts, or corporate accounts, these Very Important Customers are revered in our companies—usually because they give us a lot of money. I see lots of organizations creating Strategic Account Programs, labeling sales people as Strategic Account Managers, devoting resources and all sorts of other things, all with the goal of increasing revenue from the accounts. Sure we wrap a lot of fancy language about improving our relationships, getting closer to our important customers, and so forth—but really our goal is for them to spend more money on us. I’ve been on […]
Finding The Decision Maker
As sales people, we are trained to ruthlessly seek out the decision maker and focus all our efforts on that individual. Whether it’s to understand their needs, provide insight, pitch a solution, our focus is on finding the decision maker and locking in on that individual. We’re trained to ask pointed questions like, “Are you the decision maker?” There’s only one answer that a customer will give to that question–it’s “Yes,” or the variant, “Yes, I’m involved in making the decision.” As a side note, do we ever expect the customer to say, “No, I just had idle time on […]
Moving From The Teaching Pitch To A Collaborative Dialog
The art of the “pitch” continues to be escalated. The sales person has always had a role of “teaching” or “educating” customers. But what we teach them has and will continue to evolve. We pitched (too many still do) our products. Customer have never found this to be really valuable. They want the conversations to be focused on them and what they want to achieve. Product pitches were about us and what we had to sell. In the past, product pitches did play a role in educating our customers. Sales people taught customers about our product capabilities and how they […]
Focus–What Separates Top Performers From Everyone Else
We’re all incredibly busy. Our days get filled with all sorts of things–things which may seem very urgent. We have emails to respond to, we have meetings of all sorts, we have proposals, the lists go on. Things pop up through the day or week, a crisis, something that must be addressed, or just something that diverts our attention. Too often, we go through our days like bumper cars. Each time we hit one, we bounce off, headed another direction. Go into any sales office, and there’s always a frenzy of activity, people coming and going, phones ringing, conference rooms […]
Lean Sales And Marketing–Defining Value
As I typed the title to this week’s installment on Lean Sales And Marketing, I cringed. Somehow I feel the title is redundant. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, Lean is about understanding the essence of what customers value and focusing our efforts on creating and delivering that value. The key word in the last sentence is essence. Too many times we really don’t understand what our customers value. We impose what we think they should value instead. Alternatively, we know what value our solutions provide, so we seek to impose these on them. We develop all sorts of marketing […]
When The Going Gets Tough
We’re about to enter the second half of the year. People are looking at their pipeline’s and results to date, too often seeing a big gap in their ability to meet the full year’s numbers. Panic is starting to set in, “We have to make the numbers!” Too often, as people rush to “fix” the problem, they do the wrong things, unwittingly making things worse. It’s not unusual to see a frenzy of internal meetings to assess the problem and fix it. It’s important to determine what the underlying problem is, but too often, these are “all hands,” frenzied, hand […]