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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
Value Is A Mystery
I have to thank Mike Wilkinson of Axia Value Solutions for this idea, but when he emailed me with the notion of Value Is A Mystery, it really got me thinking. From a sales point of view, it’s easy to understand that Value Is A Mystery, after all the only side of value that we know is what we can do, our products, services, capabilities, reputation, and so forth. But until we know how our customer define value, it’s a mystery to us. Sure we can approximate what they might think of in terms of value. Hopefully, our product managers […]
Is Your Customer Buying What You Are Selling?
Sales professionals get paid and measured on the products and services they sell. But is that what your customers are buying? Within our companies, everything we focus on is our products. Do they have the features and functions needed, how do they compare to competition, how are they positioned in the markets, how should they be priced. Product managers, marketing,sales, everyone talks about our products. Ultimately, we hope to get purchase orders and we ship our products. But are our customers really buying our products? Just because that’s what we happen to ship, is that really what our customers are […]
The Death Of Selling—Deja Vu All Over Again
“Tis the season to be talking about the “Death Of Sales.” which I’ll shamelessly exploit. As the year ends, I’m seeing a lot of blogs forecasting the death of sales. However, it seems that we’ve had the discussion, over and over and over….. Other than being great blog fodder, I sometimes wonder why we continually speculate about the death of sales and selling. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking on the part of the poor victims of sales people. The profession of selling can be traced back millenniums. It’s closely related to the second oldest profession, I’m sure at the time, there […]
Little Things Count!
As I was hanging up on a call with a new prospect today, the prospect said something that caught me off guard. He said, “Dave, I want to thank you for calling me right on time. So few people do that, it’s important to me and tells me a little about your professionalism. I really appreciate your respect for my time.” It really caught me off guard, I think I mumbled something like, “Thank you, I thought everyone did that.” His comment is interesting. I notice it myself the same issue myself. Someone wants to sell me something, we agree […]
Is Differentiation Overrated? What About Being Just Good Enough?
A week ago, I wrote a post,“‘Me Too,’ Is Not A Value Propsition!” With this post you’ll think that I’ve gone mad or am speaking out of both sides of my mouth. But actually this article and the “Me Too” article represent different stages our Value Propositions go through — at least in B2B sales. Too often, in speaking to people, they talk about “the value proposition,” as if it is the Holy Grail. Something that if our marketing people or product managers just got things right, all we’d have to do is utter those words, “This is our value […]
Are You The Right Person To Do This Deal?
B2B solutions, consequently B2B selling is increasingly complex. Layer on top of this the fact that buying is changing profoundly. As a result, there is a potential for a large number of people to be involved in the deal, not just from your customer, your competition, but from within your own organization. Traditionally, the sales person has been the person that “did the deal.” They qualified the lead, did all the discovery, put together the proposal, presented it, closed it. There may have been some support from within the organization, maybe a technical person to do a presentation or answer some […]