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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
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 […]
….is Lead Generation of interest to your company?
Everyday, at least one copy of the following email arrives in my junk mail folder. It is never addressed to me, though my email address is widely available. It’s always addressed to other employees in my company: Mr. Info@… or Ms. Contact_Me@… or Ms. Enroll@… never one addressed to dabrock@…… It’s always from “Bob.” The email is the same, day in, day out, week after week: Subject: ….is Lead Generation of interest to your company? …….no harm in asking. I’m a Telemarketing Lead-Generator…I work out of my home in Pennsylvania. …I use the phone to set appointments……I use the phone to […]
The Future Of Selling — It’s Social
In April, OgilvyOne announced their World’s Greatest Salesperson contest. I wrote a blog post, The World’s Greatest Salesperson, that generated a huge amount of controversy, discussion, a number of blog posts on other sites. We were all in an uproar about OgilvyOne’s position on characteristics of the world’s greatest sales person. The folks at OgilvyOne were very gracious–they contacted me, we started talking quite a bit. It turns out they were starting to do some research on the Future Of Selling. I was flattered when they asked me to be one of their top 30 experts in helping them look […]
I’m Privileged To Work With Really Smart People!
As a preface, at this time of the year, we all have a tendency to reflect a little. It’s a chance to look back at the year and think a little about what has happened and to begin to establish plans to go forward. Over the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about how privileged I am. Over the past years, I’ve had the great privilege of working with some of the most talented and smart people in the world—each of them dealing with very profound and difficult problems, balancing very difficult constraints. I really need to write this […]
“Me Too,” Is Not A Value Proposition!
A client called me up a couple of days ago with an interesting problem. They were in the closing stage of a very large deal. They had done a thoughtful job of understanding the customer business, their goals, the problems they were trying to address, and so forth. They had made a final presentation, it had included a good business analysis about the benefits the customer would get, and the value they should expect. They provided a good analysis including both hard and soft justification for their solution. After a few days, the customer cam back to my client saying, […]