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
Are You Playing For Table Stakes, Or Are You Differentiated?
It used to be great products that set us apart—more features, functions, bells and whistles. Products are no longer the differentiators—at least on an ongoing basis. Global competition keeps raising the bar almost on a daily basis. Products are important, we have to keep investing in them, but product leadership is not likely to be a sustainable differentiator. It used to be quality—our quality set us apart and caused us to win. Quality is no longer a differentiator—for the most part, it’s pretty much a level playing field—at least the customers throw out the bad quality vendors, so only vendors […]
You Need To Know What’s Keeping Them Up At Night!
“What’s keeping you up at night?” It’s a classic question many sales people use to start identifying their customers’ needs and priorities. In reality, however, it’s a terrible starting point. It may mean, you haven’t done your homwork in preparing for the call, particularly with senior executives. Great sales professionals study their customers and prospects deeply. They understand the industry, they understand their customer’s customers, they understand the key strategies and goals of each of their customers. As much as possible, they study and learn what’s happening within their organizations. Great sales people are able to put themselves in their […]
It Doesn’t Matter What We Know, It’s What The Buyer Needs
Companies spend $100’s of millions every year in training sales people about their products and solutions. As sales people, we are proud of our knowledge–naturally eager to demonstrate it to customers. Likewise, people in our company who may support us–developing sales and marketing materials, resources we may leverage to make calls an support our sales efforts—everyone is excited and passionate about the solutions we have and the great value we can bring to our customers. All of this is meaningless to the customer. The customer doesn’t care about our products and solutions. The customer doesn’t care about our enthusiasm about […]
Purposefulness–Getting What We Want versus Getting What We Get
As sales professionals, we all know what we want—-We want to win the deal, We want to beat the competitor, We want to make our quotas. We want the commission checks, We want the bonus. Ask any sales person, they’ll be very clear about what they want. Often what we want is merely wishful thinking, instead of getting what we want, we get what we get. We try hard to win the deal, we can’t quite beat the competitor, we missed our quota this year, but we’ll do better next year, the excuses can go on. Great sales professionals get […]
When Customers Really Want To Buy–Perishable Demand!
A couple of weeks ago, I really needed to make a relatively major purchase in support of a project I was doing for a client. I did my due diligence, found a few alternatives, found the solution I really wanted and called a salesperson. I got his voicemail, left a message outlining my urgent requirement. I also sent an email, saying in wanted to give him my money as quickly as possible. Then I waited….. and waited…. and waited….. I put another call in, another email, and waited… and waited… Needless to say, I went to my second alternative, it […]
Metrics, It’s All Relative
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece, What We Miss About Sales Metrics. In some of the discussions around that piece and in a number of separate discussions I’ve seen around the different sales communities, I’ve been amazed at some of the “zealotry” around metrics. There are a number of people, some self proclaimed guru’s, spending a lot of time about “the right metrics.” The suggestion is that there is only one way a certain metric should be measured, or certain metrics are mandatory, or….. It may be my stubbornness or my resistance to follow the “rules,” but […]