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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
On Being Customer Centric
Customer Centricity is a hot topic these days. I get on my soapbox on Customer Focus, Customer Experience, How Buying Is Changing, and various aspects of being Customer Centric. As a result, I get a lot of calls and queries about being Customer Centric. To tell you the truth, many of them are very disturbing. They often go something like this (this composite, actually understates what I’ve experienced). Caller: My organization has to be more customer centric. Dave: Cool, what’s driving this initiative? Caller: My boss has told us we have to do this. Dave: OK, that’s interesting. Why does […]
Sales Goals Or Sales Process, Which Is Most Important?
Geoffrey James wrote an interesting article at BNET, Sales Goals vs. Sales Process: Which Is Most Important? Frankly, the question confuses me, it assumes that sales goals and sales process are mutually exclusive. Geoffrey seems conflicted, as well. Later, using the example of an Olympic athlete, he states, “For the Olympic athlete, the process leads naturally and progressively towards the goal.” The whole point of a sales process is that it is goal directed. The best sales processes represent the organization’s best experience in winning business–achieving goals. The only reason to have a sales process is because it provides us […]
You Lose Because Of What You Don’t Do
Over the past few days, I’ve been participating in a loss review with one of my clients. It was a painful loss, it was a major opportunity, with a prestigious customer. The winner would lock up the business for the foreseeable future. My client had been pursuing this opportunity for over a year. The sale was for a relatively complex piece of capital equipment. The support teams had done many demonstrations and tests, they had made modifications to the base software to support customer requirements. Through the entire process, they were neck to neck with the competition. In the end, they were even slightly […]
Are You Playing At The Top Of Your Game?
I know, I know, we use way too many sports metaphors to talk about selling. But we really can learn a lot by watching high performing athletes in some of the most important sports events.This past weekend was packed with some of my favorite sports, the finals at Wimbledon, the World Cup, the start of the Tour de France, and toss in a few nice golf tournaments. Watching them provoked some thoughts: You can’t be successful without the support of your team: Sales is a team sport–even if you sell by yourself. the days of the “lone wolf” are gone […]
May I Speak To Ms. Company Inc?
I got a really interesting email today–actually, I get these emails periodically from various organizations. Today’s was from a very large company that we’ve done business with before (we are a customer of the company). The email was very personal, it started: Dear Dave………. It continued with an interesting message about our relationship, introducing me to new products and capabilities. Overall, it was a pretty good letter. At the end, it was signed by: “Company, Inc.” (OK, I’m chickening out, I’m not mentioning the name of the company—actually, I get these types of letters from a number of organizations). Hmm, […]
Are You Selling Within Your Own Company?
I’m constantly surprised by how poorly many sales people communicate within their own organizations. Sales people complain, “I’m not getting the information I need to finalize my proposal to the customer,” “My customer isn’t getting the service levels I committed,” “I’m not getting the support I need to do this deal,” and the whining can go on. At the same time, when I talk to people within the organization, I hear, “Our sales people aren’t keeping us informed of what’s going on, we need to know what’s happening to manage our resources properly,” “The sale person just dumps all this […]