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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
What Are Our Customers Really Buying?
Many lifetimes ago, I was the Executive Assistant (today we call it Chief of Staff) for one of the top executives at IBM. One morning I was meeting with him, he had just returned from a trip, calling on customers and meeting with people in the branch offices in Boston. George was a little frustrated about his visit, particularly with a meeting with a sales team. They had just won a very large order. It was from a very important customer and was toughly competed. He met with the team to congratulate them on their success and to learn more […]
Where Were The Leaders When People Were Struggling?
As we see more organizations announce reductions and layoffs, we are seeing more CEOs use poor seller performance as an excuse for the layoffs. One CEO said, “We’ve identified more than 100 people on our sales team who have consistently missed expectations. Simply put, a significant percentage of our sales force has been repeatedly underperforming based on measurable performance targets and critical KPIs. That’s obviously a problem. But it’s one in this environment with a particularly available and actionable solution. We are now in the process of quickly rotating out those members of our team who have been underperforming.” I […]
Simplifying Value Creation
As sellers and leaders, we know we are supposed to create value–for our customers, our people, and each other. Too many of us, me included, tend to be very glib about the term, assuming everyone automatically understands what is meant by value creation. I’ve come to realize, despite how much we talk about it, we really don’t understand what it means, often overcomplicating it. Let me try to, briefly, recast value creation. At least in selling, for ages we’ve talked about “value propositions.” These focus on the results created from the implementation of a solution. For example, if our proposed […]
“Our Solutions Address All These Problems….”
Often, we have solutions and capabilities that address a wide range of customer challenges or problems. It may be we have a solution that have a wide range of capabilities (A lot of IT solutions, enterprise wide solutions, professional services, etc.). Or we may have a portfolio of solutions that address a range of things that are helpful to the customer. Too often, in our outreach to customers, we inflict all the things we can do for them. Then we leave it to the customer to figure out where they need the help. And we know what happens, the customer […]
Time Available For Selling
We, our customers, colleagues, managers are time poor! In reality, we will always be that way, we will have more demands on our time than we have time to commit. For years, I’ve been lobbying for a 30 hour day or a 9 day workweek, somehow thinking things would be better if we just had more time. But, as much as I argue for these changes, they seem unlikely to be accepted. History is filled with innovations intended to help us leverage our time much more impactfully. We used to be limited in the time we could spend with customers […]
Why I Love Selling
Having anything to do with sales was the furthest thing from my mind when I was thinking about a job following college. I’d had a few selling experiences as a kid. In Boy Scouts, there was always an event of some sort that we had to sell tickets for. My Mom usually bought the allocation I was assigned to sell. Sometimes a neighbor would buy them (but I think my Mom had called saying she would pay for them). In high school, I worked afternoons and weekends at a local sports shop. While I had to help some customers, the […]