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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 Subjectiveness Of Value
I’m a fan of Larry Levine, he provokes thoughtful discussions. Recently he led a discussion around value creation comparing two organizations with very different value propositions, Walmart and Nordstroms. The conversation was interesting, a little confusing. Some were taking positions the “high touch” of the Nordstrom experience is superior to that of the low touch, low cost (?) experience of Walmart. Clearly, both companies have very different strategies around their customer experience and value proposition. And their respective customers don’t expect a convergence of those strategies. I happen to shop at both, and I enjoy and value the experience I […]
Blinded By The Hype
In the late 70’s I was captivated by the song, “Blinded By The Light,” performed by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. It was one of those “pump you up songs.” I’d listed to it during my morning runs along the East River. Listened as I was starting my day in the office. I didn’t realize for a few months that Bruce Springsteen had written and recorded it in the early 70’s. With respect to Bruce, I always liked Manfred Mann’s version better. Recently, I’ve been thinking about the song as I look at all the stuff going on with ChatGPT in […]
Why Do We Think Our Customers Know What They Are Doing?
Shout out to my friends Matt Heinz and Brent Adamson. In listening to their weekly webcast, for a few moments, Brent was whining about the issue of “Why do we think our customers know what they are doing?” It’s an important issue. It’s an important opportunity for sellers to be truly helpful with customers. Let me be clear, our customers know their business, their work, workflows and how they get things done. Undoubtedly, they are experts in their jobs. We can never come close to them in their knowledge and expertise. Even if we’ve held similar jobs, the specific situations […]
Preaching To The Choir…..
I was confronted with a really discomforting thought today. As I listened to a brilliant webcast hosted by Aaron Evans, with Todd Caponi, Matt Dixon, and Anthony Iannarino. It was a brilliant discussion. The comments from the 300 plus participants showed the wild agreement from the audience. But then, I realized, while interesting, informative and, sometimes, entertaining (Matt, I get such great joy in laughing at you….), I realized the audience weren’t the people that needed to hear this. They had all bought in, we each picked up something new and learned, but the people that need to think about […]
Educating Our Customers….
Hank Barnes wrote a brilliant post, “A Question Of Prospect Education” It’s an important post, be sure to read it. We tend, to often, to get this wrong. When we educate our customers, whether inbound or outbound, we tend to educate our customers on “Why buy us!” We focus on discussions around the presumption they are well educated on the issues, buying, change; focusing our discussions on proving the superiority of our solutions/products over the alternatives they may consider. We make a giant leap forward, too often, leaving our customers behind; lost, confused, and fumbling in their change and buying […]
“Can You Help Us……?”
“Can you help us…….” is music to every seller’s ears. It’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it’s the “Ka–Ching” that sounds when we hit the jackpot. It’s the foundation of all inbound. We leap into action demonstrating how our products answer the customer’s question, we talk about how we are the right company to “help” them. But there’s problem, not enough prospects are coming to us with that question. For those that do, we do everything we can to get them to choose us, but the reality there is never enough, We need more! And […]