Dave Brock

Insight is a key differentiators in the value we create for our customers, throughout their buying process.  The insights we provide, the ability to help the customer think about their businesses differently is critical both to their and our success.  Driving different conversations moving into co-creation changes everything about buying, selling, our value and our relationships with our customers.

So I’m troubled by the notion of the Insight or Teaching Pitch.  It somehow seems like a “Dear occupant or current resident, I’ve got ideas about your business.”

Maybe I’m confused about Insight. Ideas are ideas–probably actually commodities, though our egos may prevent us from seeing this.  I may be interested in talking about ideas, but most of all I’m concerned about what they mean to me.

Ideas open the conversation.  But if a sales person came to me offering Insight, I would expect it to be specific to me, my business,...

For years, we’ve been trained, “Customers want solutions.”  The best of us try to sell solutions, moving beyond just product features, functions, and benefits.  To a large degree, we’ve trained our customers to expect this.  They engage us looking for solutions, listen to our presentations, discuss them, and ultimately buy.

In reality, our solutions are just a component of the solution our customers are looking for.  All of us live in complex adaptive systems.  Both our own companies and our customers’ organizations represent a constantly changing and evolving set of interactions, shifting priorities, agendas, needs, systems, and processes.  To be successful in achieving our goals in selling our solutions, we have to help the customer successfully implement the “whole solutions.”

Too often, we fail to do this, we focus on our part of the transaction, perhaps helping develop and implementation plan, but not going beyond that.  But we...

Don’t get me wrong, you have to be responsive to your customers.  You have to provide compelling and meaningful answers to their questions.  But even your best responses to their questions are not likely to be sufficient to differentiate you and win.

In today’s very tough B2B sales world, it’s very difficult to differentiate our offerings from those of the competition.  Tough competitors are always very close in features, functions, capabilities, even pricing. The quality of products, the reputations of the companies are very similar.   There are small nuances or differences, but they are rarely the deal winners.  So your customers is going to ask everyone the same questions, and get roughly the same answers.

Or they may not even ask them, after all, they can ask them in Bing or Google, and get any number of responses.  Some studies indicate customers complete as much as 70% of the buying process prior to engaging sales–by that time,...

I had a fascinating conversation with a sales executive today.  His team was inspired by Challenger and Insight selling, as so many of us are.  They had gone through the training and were ready to start providing insights to their customers, transforming the customer engagement process, intercepting the customer before they had even recognized they have a problem or opportunity.

After he went through the background, he then said, “We’re ready, we’re confident we can engage the customer in a different way, but we’re just struggling with coming up with meaningful insights to share with our customers.”

I’ve heard others talking about this before and realized that maybe we are making insight more complicated than it really is.  We tend to think of “insight” as bigger than life types of discussions with customers.  In the past, I’ve shared the story of my team talking to Boeing executives in the early 80′s about a vision for new ways to...