Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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 About Our Competitors???
We are obsessed with our competition. We study them and their strategies. We compare them, their solutions, their capabilities to ours. We read their reviews, reveling over the customer complaints, trying to figure out how to leverage them into our strategies. We develop playbooks and battlecards to help position ourselves. And then there’s the comparison checklists on our websites. You know the one’s I’m talking about. They present a long list of features and capabilities of our products, often very obscure like, “Sponsors grade school soccer teams….” Then our products are positioned in the first column with the competitors products […]
What Problem Is Your Customer Trying To Solve?
My friend Hank Barnes wrote an outstanding post, Clarifying Objectives To Gain Consensus. In the post, he outlined a major reason customers struggle with buying is because of conflicting objectives within the buying team. We shouldn’t be surprised by this, yet, based on some of the discussion it seems we are. Let me give an analogy, we all know the example of how a group of blind people arrayed around an elephant describe it very differently. To some it’s a snake, to others it may be a fan, to another it may be a wall. None is necessarily wrong, they […]
Pipeline Management
The sales pipeline is, perhaps, one of the most misunderstood things in selling. We know the pipeline is critical to helping us answer the question, “Are we pursuing enough opportunities to achieve our goals?” We harass sellers to use CRM, keeping their opportunities updated so we can track our pipelines. Yet, too often, they are very inaccurate, gamed, or we don’t understand what the pipeline is telling us. As a result, one of the most useful tools for understanding and managing performance, is not used to it’s full power. Over the past few weeks, I’ve written a number of articles […]
On Scarcity And Abundance
The concepts of scarcity and abundance touch all aspects of our lives. The more scarce something is, the more we tend to value and want it. The more abundant something is, the more we take it for granted of fail to pay attention to it. We see it in virtually every aspect of our lives. A common example in these discussions is food. When food is scarce, we tend to be very careful with what food we acquire and consume. When food is plentiful, we are prone to huge waste and bad diets. As we look at scarcity and abundance […]
What’s Old Is New……..
I was reading an interesting article today. It concerned a group of early stage CEOs looking for “new approaches to selling.” The arguments were thoughtful–“Is there a faster easier way to scale?” These executives struggled to hire and onboard quickly enough to address the opportunity. “Is there a more cost effective way to reach customers than through a direct sales organization?” “How do we more quickly expand into new markets, where our sales people have no experience?” The “Aha” moment came to these executives when the discovered the potential of leveraging “ecosystems.” These “ecosystems” are various types of partnerships–resellers, channel […]
Data, Data, Everywhere…….
In Samuel Coleridge’s The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, there’s a famous line, “Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.” Today, we seem to face the same thing in selling, except now it’s data. We have more ability to collect data, about customers, about the performance of our marketing initiatives, about the performance of our sales people. We have terabytes of data we’ve never been able to collect, we’ve technology platforms and tools that enable us to leverage this data in very powerful ways. One would think the availability of this data, implementing these tools would drive huge advances […]