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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
“This Is What We Do…..”
We all recognize this, “This is what we do….,” or some variation of this appears in the first or second sentence of every prospecting message we get. The rest of the message goes on to explain more of what the sender’s company does. Perhaps they talk more about products/services. Maybe they brag about their premier customer list. Or it’s something about how fantastic their company is. And they end the same way, “Please schedule time on my calendar to learn more about the fantastic things we do and how you can take advantage of them…” And there is the obligatory […]
I Don’t Care How Many Calls You Make Or Emails You Send!
I read an article about the key productivity metrics managers are tracking. According to the survey of over 1000 sales managers, the five most popular metrics were: CRM utilization, Calls made, Emails sent, Conversations, Use of sales tools. I was left scratching my head, thinking, “WTF??????” With the exception of conversations, none of those have been metrics I’ve cared about. I don’t care about CRM utilization. Measuring a sales person’s CRM utilization is absolutely meaningless. This doesn’t mean CRM isn’t important. CRM is a critical tool to help improve seller productivity. But I’m not going to measure it. However, every […]
Who’s Our Ideal Customer?
I’ve taken a break from my series “Things We Thought We Knew About Selling But Really Didn’t.” Restarting it, I want to talk about our Ideal Customers–or our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile.) We toss the term around casually, but when I look at too many pipelines or prospecting programs, the ICP is not discernible. We have a tendency to try to sell to anyone. If someone has visited our website, if they are on a procured mailing list, if they fog a mirror, we try to engage them. If our pipelines are lean, we cast a wider net. We relax […]
Value Realization Is Only Table Stakes, What Differentiates Us?
Recently, I read a pretty old article in HBR: Business Marketing: Understanding What Customers Value. It’s a good article, written in 1998. It presents what all of us, at the time, focused on in our value positioning/creation. I learned this and have taught it to thousands of sellers, it’s the value realized through the implementation of our solutions. We have always focused on this as our value proposition. The reality, is the other solutions, those offered by our competitors, probably offer similar value. Of course, there are small nuances and differences; “we do it this way, they do it differently…. […]
“It’s The Way We Put It Together, That Sets Us Apart”
Too often, when we look at high performance organizations or sellers, we tend to focus on one or two things they do, attributing those their success. “High performers leverage technology…..” “High performers are better prospectors….” “They create much superior value…” “They have consistently better pipelines….” “They leverage social platforms….” ……and on and on… We can go on and on with the single things that high performing people and organizations do better than others. And, too often, those “single performance levers,” have to do with something someone is selling. Perhaps a sales methodology, technology/tools, a service or consulting program. We nurture […]
Our Fears Of Losing….
Classically, we tend to view winning and losing as two sides of the same coin. If we don’t win, we lose and vice versa. As a result, we are supposed to focus on those things that cause us to win. The problem is, fear of losing more often freezes us. We choose to do nothing–or keep doing the same. By doing this, we may not win. But more importantly we don’t lose! Let me restate this. We are committed to not losing! But that doesn’t imply a commitment to winning. It is human nature to want to minimize loss. We […]