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
The Seduction Of “React/Respond…..”
We live in worlds of constant interruption. Each morning, our inboxes and feeds are filled. Our attentions are drawn to those, we go through them, dealing with each one. Some one has asked a question, we have to respond with an answer. Someone has raised an issue, we have to address it. Something has happened in our social feeds, we have to jump into the conversation, if only to click a like. Our customers, partners, peers, managers ask us questions or make suggestions, we have to deal with each of them, immediately. Our phones and other devices vibrate, an alert […]
Letting Our Customers Ask Us The Wrong Questions!
It’s SKO season, yesterday I was leading a discussion with a great sales team. One of the sellers asked a question about dealing with customer questions and queries about the products, particularly deeply technical questions. As we spoke, it struck me how we revel in these questions. Customers asking us about the product capabilities, drilling deeply into what the products and solutions do. These are the discussions we strive to get since it is all about us and what we sell. But are they asking us the right questions? When we look at the data on No Decision Made and […]
What We Miss About Value
The majority of sellers don’t understand value. As a result, the only thing they talk about is the product–it’s features and functions, customers using the solutions, how great their company is, and how the product is better than competition. They don’t understand the customer, as a result, can’t translate what the solutions mean to the customer. Perhaps, they’ve been trained generally, so they understand the solution might improve productivity, reduce costs, improves quality, or help drive revenue. They quote results from other customers and cite generalities about the results those customers have achieved. But they can’t translate it to specific […]
The Problem With Algorithms
Our lives seem dominated by algorithms. Sign onto Amazon or any other shopping site, and we are pummeled with recommendations, all based on what we’ve bought and recent searches we may have made. Many of our news feeds present content based on that which we have read and consumed in the past. Facebook, LinkedIn and other social channels are (in)famous for feeding us content based both on our interaction with the content and their insight into activity on other sites. All of this is targeted at maximizing our time on these sites (and our spending) based on the predictions on […]
We Make Selling Far More Difficult Than Necessary!
Confession time. I’m terribly lazy. I want to accomplish a lot, but I want to do it with minimal effort. As I look at selling, today, it requires far too much effort—far more than I’m willing to do. After all, we have to send 1000s of emails a day, we have to make 100s of calls, we have to spend hours doing outreach in LinkedIn and other channels. It’s harder and harder to get a response. 5 years ago, it took 200-400 touches to get a response. Today, it’s 1000-1500! Who knows what it will be next year! And when […]
Scaling “Sameness….”
Differentiation is critical. We know it. We invest a lot of time and effort in differentiating our products and services from the alternatives. We do endless feature-function comparisons. We carefully construct comparative checklists, identifying the capabilities that set us apart from other offerings—always making sure we check more boxes for our offerings than the competition checks off. And our competitors construct their version of the same comparative checklists, featuring more checks in their boxes of features-functions. When we meet with customers we focus on the differentiation of our offerings in those conversations. We talk about the results our customers get, […]