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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
Rising Tides Float All Ships, But What About Falling Tides?
“Rising Tides Float All Ships,” a bit of an odd title, given the current economic uncertainty. This term has been used to talk about the false sense of success many individual and executives may have about their peersonal performance and that of their organizations. In great times, or robust growing markets, it’s hard to perform badly. To some degree, regardless how sharp or well executed strategies are, how good your sales and marketing programs are, organizations may seem successful—even when they may not be performing as well as they could—or even when they are performing pretty poorly. In bad markets, […]
Business Acumen–More Than Price
I talk to lots of people about their value propositions and the business cases they have presented for their solutions. People seem to talk the talk, but in reality, I see few people really focusing on the business value of their solutions. Part of the problem is many customers don’t seem to want a business case, they just ask us, “What’s your best price?” But that’t no excuse. If we only respond by providing pricing, then we will win or lose on price. It’s our responsibility as sales professionals to help our customers understand the value our solutions brings–convincing them […]
Customer Service Is Overrated!
I was reading an interesting discussion on customer loyalty at Focus.com. The responses focused on great customer service. This matches my experience when I talk to executives worldwide. It’s what most customers cite when questions about how they make buying decisions. Sometimes, I wonder if all of us, customers included are missing the point. Don’t get me wrong, customer service is critical, but I wonder if there is something that’s really more important. What if we designed products, services, buying experiences that didn’t need customer service? How could I as a customer be truly delighted? If I’m buying a new software product, I don’t […]
Performance Management Friday — % Of Opportunities Advanced
Our goal as sales people is to help our customers move through their buying process. We want to help them move as rapidly as possible to making a decision (hopefully for us). From our point of view, as sales professionals, we monitor this as progress through the funnel or pipeline. Ideally, on a monthly basis, we want to see new deals flowing into the pipeline, deals closing and moving out of the pipeline, and deals moving from stage to stage within the pipeline. A couple of months ago, I wrote about Pipeline Flow/Velocity. It’s one way of looking at whether […]
How Do You Know If The Customer “Knows?”
As sales professionals, we are supposed to be masters of effective communication, yet too many times we overlook even the simplest of issues. We’ve sent the customer some information–we assume the read it. We’ve sent the customer some information–we assume they understand it. We’ve sent the customer information and assume it addresses their needs, because we believe it addresses their needs. We think we have answered a question or responded to a concern, but really haven’t. Based on their “experience” and “background” we assume they know certain things. They’ve sent us a query, we are working on it, we assume […]
What’s Next? Do You Really Have A Deal Strategy?
I must review hundreds to thousands of deals every year. Often, sales people struggle, the deal is stalled, they are losing traction, they need to make something happen and move the deal to closure. Often in reviewing deals, I feel as though I am watching a ping pong game. The sales person does something (ping), the customer responds (pong), the sales person follows up (ping), the customer asks a question (pong), …….. This can drag on endlessly, or it can stop at any time the customer loses interest. Sales people need to be more purposeful in thinking about their sales […]