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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
“Relationship” Selling…..
I was listening to a webcast recently and the “new” concept of “Relationship” selling came up. Apparently the speakers were noticing the fact that to develop trust and confidence with our customers, we have to build some sort of relationship. The discussion went further, discussing concepts around FOFU, sensemaking, decision confidence, all requiring some level of relationship in helping the customer understand and move forward. It’s fascinating that after more than a decade of mechanizing our engagement strategies, we are now discovering that, ultimately, selling is all about people working with people. Whether it’s within the buying team itself, our […]
“Don’t Cancel” Vs. “Buy Again”
We know retention is critical to every business strategy. Somehow, the SaaS crowd thinks they’ve invented the concept, but the reality is that it’s been a business fundamental since the foundation of business. Dig into any earnings report of any organization in the world. Look at the portion of revenue from net new logos versus current customers buying again. Early stage companies will be biased to net new logos, but as they mature, the balance of revenue shifts to current customers. It becomes critical to get customers retain customers, for them to continue to buy or to buy again. Along […]
Deal Slippage
Deal slippage is a huge issue for all sellers, but also for buyers. Let’s dive into what drives deal slippage. Most deal slippage is not really deal slippage. Let me call it “faux slippage.” This slippage has nothing to do with the buyer, their sense of urgency, or when they need to have a solution in place. Faux slippages is a result of seller error. It occurs for any number of reasons, including: We act as though target close dates are important, but we don’t tend to focus on the importance and the basis for selecting a certain date. One […]
“This Is What We Do…..”
So many of our prospecting and initial conversations start with a variant of “This is what we do….” It may be phrased as a question, “Do you need solutions that help you do these things….?” Or it may be more directly tied to our products, “Our product will help you achieve this….” However we phrase it, from the outset of the conversation, we are focusing the attention on us, our company, and our products. And our prospects and customers don’t care! It’s this focus on what we do and not what the customer cares about that impacts our ability to […]
Thinking About Retention, Renewal, Expansion Differently
It is human nature to look at things from our own points of view. But it’s restricting our thinking in those ways that blinds us to things that are changing around us, threats, opportunities, challenges, disruptions. Retention, renewal, expansion is key to our success with customers. We want to create customers for life! We want to have the continue to buy from us. It may be upgrading to our latest product, for example going from the IPhone 15 to the anticipated IPhone 16. It may be renewing subscriptions to current products, keeping them using our products forever. It may be […]
The Conundrum Of “Freeing Up Time,” Part 2
Time management is always an issue, and with everyone. We leverage tools, techniques, technologies that are supposed to make us more efficient and to free up time. But we still struggle. I wrote about the challenge high performers face in “The Conundrum Of Freeing Up Time, Part 1.” This post focuses on how we look at this issue with medium and low performers. In the past two decades, we have been overwhelmed with technologies that focus on improving the efficiency of our people. In the past two years AI tools have accelerated this. We can generate more emails in a […]