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
“We Need This Order By The End Of The Quarter….”
We are driven by our need to book orders and meet our goals. To do this, we often try to “entice” the customer into a deal. “If we get the order by the end of the quarter, we will give you a 10% discount….” In reality, the only time this ever works is when the customer has already decided to make a decision by the end of the quarter. All we’ve done is given away some revenue. We haven’t convinced them to buy earlier. Our urgency is absolutely irrelevant to the customer! Yet we consistently sell based on our schedules, […]
Automating Meaningless Work!
We continue to be enamored with all the things AI does for us. We feel productive because AI speeds up drafting emails, doing reporting, transcribing meeting notes, managing our calendars, doing our research. Then we are astounded, not just with the tasks we no longer have to do, but with the way AI amplifies these tasks. It just doesn’t automate the work, but it enables us to scale this work at levels that had been unimaginable. Seeing the volume of things it does for us, create an illusion of progress. But too often, what we are doing is just scaling […]
Our Customers’ Jobs Are Not To Understand Us And What We Do!
We spend a lot of our time trying to make our customers understand our products and what they do. We want them to understand how our products solve their problems. We want them to see why our solutions are superior to what they are currently doing, or the alternatives they are considering. The problem with this is that’s not their job! It’s not their job to understand us and what we do, it’s our job to understand them. When we force our customers to understand us, most won’t take the time. They are consumed with doing their day jobs. They […]
Empathy, Authenticity, Meaning As Competitive Advantage?
In our GTM strategies, in our engagement strategies, we constantly look for differentiators and competitive advantage. Most of the time we are focused on our solutions. “We have more features functions… We have prestigious customers, you can be one too…. We have great customer service…. We are cheaper, if you decide by the end of the month…. Our products beat the pants off our competitors!” And sometimes these things work. We can actually show differentiation based on our solutions. But these are short-lived, as our competitors copy them and try to one-up us. Sometimes, we try to create competitive advantage […]
How To Use AI To Reclaim Deep Work
I’m a tremendous fan of Azeem Azhar’s Substack posts Exponential View. While I may not always agree, in each post I learn a huge amount. I encourage you to subscribe. Recently a post, How To Use AI To Reclaim Deep Work caught my eye. Azeem, was posing the question, “Can AI finally clean my inbox (Slack, etc).” Another very insightful person addressed this and how he has developed the tools to help him manage this problem. He provides a series of prompts you can cut and paste to achieve the same goals. But, as I read it, I thought, “What […]
With The Rise Of Agentic AI, Do We Risk Losing Our Agency?
Perhaps, one of the most thoughtful recent articles is a post by Joshua Bellin, The Web Without Us. It talked about the introduction, from several of the LLM suppliers, of AI-Native Web Browsers. In a side conversation, Joshua and I started talking more broadly about Agentic AI, and what it means for us as humans. The discussion, expressed in the title, is, “With the rise of Agentic AI, Do we risk losing our Agency?” I’m casually tossing around slightly philosophical concepts, so let me dive in, perhaps more pragmatically. When we talk about Agentic AI, we are talking about a […]