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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
We Have It All Wrong When We Think About Sales Training
A colleague was recently sharing research on how people learn. The data was very interesting and, perhaps, explains why we don’t get the results we expect from sales (or other) training programs. She shared this data: 10% of learning comes through formal training programs, 20% comes through observation and feedback, and the remaining 70% of learning comes through real world experience. Interesting stuff! As I reflected on the challenges we face in sales training, it would seem we focus too much time and too many dollars on the part of the issue that has the smallest impact on learning. I […]
What Would Happen If We Saw Things The Way Our Customers Saw Them?
Most of the organizations I work with are very high performance organizations. They have great products, great sales people, and provide solutions that can have great impact on their customers. However, in meeting with them, I often hear, “Our customers just don’t get it, they don’t see the impact we produce! How do we get them to better understand?” The challenge, time after time, is that we have great products that solve important customer problems. But we express those problems that we solve in our terms—using our language. Because we are sophisticated it has to include at least one really […]
Value Propositions Change Through The Sales Cycle
Too often, we tend to think of our value propositions as static. Effective value propositions will change as we execute our sales process. Early on, as we are prospecting and early in the qualification process, the value proposition needs to be only compelling enough to capture the customer’s interest and to get them to consider your solution as an alternative to consider. We don’t have to be differentiated, we don’t have to be superior, we only need to be good enough to be invited to the party. The generic or segment focused value propositions developed by marketing are typically focused […]
Sales Management, It’s About Inspecting The Process, Not Transactions
This article has been selected for DeFinis Communications’ “Sales Coaching: Top Tips for Increased Productivity” Blog Carnival. You can enjoy even more posts from other exceptional bloggers at their website. I’ve been away for a week working with a great sales management team. We were doing a deep dive into the issues they faced in maximizing the performance of the organization. An issue came up that I see with virtually every sales manager: “The workloads in managing the volume of activity with our people is overwhelming us, how can we possibly survive with the ever increasing workload.” Too often, as […]
Fun With Value Propositions
Over the past few months, I have had the opportunity to talk and write a lot about value propositions. I’ve seen a lot of approaches and thought it would be great to create a template, a customizable silver bullet, if you will, that sales people can cut and paste to save time in developing their own value propositions. In using this template, we’ve discovered a “best practice” is to apply it unchanged, but to literally cut and paste it. The benefits of this are self evident–it really engages the customer in creating your unique value proposition. (Cut here)______________________________________ Dear Occupant […]
Can Value Propositions Be Generic?
My friend Christian Mauer has written an interesting post entitled, “Can Value Propositions Be Generic?” I can’t resist weighing in. The purpose of a value proposition is to help the customer understand What’s In It For Them (WIIFM) for implementing your solution. The value proposition is what the customer uses to compare alternatives–so clearly to win, your value proposition has to be superior in meeting their requirements. So does the Value Proposition need to be unique? Well – it depends. How’s that for taking a strong position? Here’s the problem with many of these discussions, Value Is In The Eye Of The Beholder. It is meaningless […]