Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Are You Distinctive?
I’ve been reading some fascinating work on marketing, brand building, differentiation (Imagine ever learning something from marketers 😉 ) I listened to a fascinating webcast by Mark Ritson about Differentiation, take some time to listen to it. It prompted me to think a little about differentiation and much more about distinctiveness. First, a few quick thoughts about differentiation. We tend to misunderstand and misuse differentiation. We look at how we (our companies/ourproducts) are different from the alternatives. We have endless feature/function comparisons, trying to demonstrate our offerings are different from the competition. Or we compare our customers, “we have these […]
Human Interaction Is Not Designed For Efficiency
As sellers, we are obsessed with efficiency. It’s no surprise, we have more demands on our time than we have time to fulfill those demands. We constantly seek better ways to accomplish more. For decades, technology continues to offer ways to improve our efficiency (and every once in a while, our effectiveness–but that’s a separate post). In addition to technology, we revise and redesign our processes to make us more efficient. Role specialization helps us more efficiently manage our relationships with customers. We have SDRs/BDRs focused on prospecting. AEs manage qualified deals, Customer Service manages the relationships after we have […]
What Business Problem Is Your Customer Solving? How Do They Solve It?
What business problem is your customer solving? Hopefully, it’s the problem you are the best in the world at solving. If it isn’t, you are wasting your and the customer time. If I pose this question to sellers, the responses I get are usually about what their products do. Mostly it’s descriptions of features, functions, capabilities. At best, they obliquely address a real business problem. To effectively engage our customers in business conversations, we have to understand the and be able to talk to them about their business problem first. But then, we have to first know what types of […]
Collaborative Conversations, How Do We Have Them?
Collaborative conversations are at the core of about everything we achieve in business. They are the core of great coaching conversations. They are the foundation of high impact conversations with our customers. We, me included, tend to be very glib about these. We tend to talk about them, assuming everyone immediately knows what what we mean and how we execute them. In reality, we are pretty bad. As managers, for various good/bad reasons, we are too often in tell mode. As sellers, too often we focus on “pitching” our prospects and customers–these are the furthest from collaborative conversations we can […]
Freeing Up Our Time, Or Using Our Time More Effectively?
Time management is a huge issue for all of us, but particularly important for sellers. A lot of the conversation focuses on “freeing up time.” But as I think about it, is the issue really about freeing up time or is it about using our time more effectively? For example, Gartner published an interesting analysis. They looked at how sellers are spending their time. While Gartner’s article suggests shifts in how that time is allocated—most of which I disagree with, this chart is interesting. Looking at prospecting and conducting sales calls–sellers are spending 33% of their time engaging with customers/prospects. […]
Doing Your Homework
Growing up, often my Dad, and sometimes my Mom, would really piss me off. Every evening after dinner they would say, “Go do your homework!” My sisters and I always had more interesting things we wanted to do, whether it was getting together with friends or watching something on TV. But they were very strict, before we did anything else, we had to complete our homework. Sometimes they would sit with us, looking at what we were doing, helping us where we were struggling. Mom would always read the papers we wrote and make suggestions. When I went to college, […]