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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
Ask Questions That Require Thinking
We are trained to ask questions. But our orientation is to ask questions that demand answers. As a result, conversations often resemble a ping pong game. The server starts with a question, then the response, back and forth. Then the other person serves, asks a question, expects a response, back and forth. A lot of information is exchanged, but the exchange of information doesn’t mean that we are connecting and having collaborative conversations. And if all we are doing is sharing information, there are too many opportunities for others to get that information through other sources. As a result the […]
We Will Have “Gotten AI” When We Stop Talking About AI!
By 6 am, my inbox is already overflowing with emails touting AI: “How family offices can use Google’s AI Ops playbook,” “How AI powered sales playbooks accelerate revenue growth,” “Selling AI, cracking the code,” “The talent acquisition revolution is here, unleash AIs power in recruiting,” and about 10 more. And my feed in LinkedIn is dominated by AI-though most of these tend to focus on miracle cures. But look at past breakthrough technologies. We no longer talk about electricity, except like yesterday when I lost power in my office for 4 hours (Thank goodness for Starbucks). We no longer talk […]
What If You Couldn’t Talk About Your Product?
Imagine a first call or meeting with a prospect. What if you couldn’t talk about your product or solution—even if the customer asked about it? What would you talk about? Sure, you could exchange small talk, common interests, sports, hobbies. But that wears thin very quickly, you are wasting your time, the customer is wasting theirs. You may be breaking out in a sweat on what to do after the small talk. All you’ve been trained to do is talk about your product. So what do you talk about? Probably, you are forced into talking to the customer about what […]
“…..More Than A Job….”
I’m reading General Stanley McChrystal’s book, On Character. A sentence stood out, “During my career, the Army was more than a job—it was a life choice.” Coincidentally, I read another fascinating article from Alex McCann, The death of the corporate job. They are approaching the same issue, but coming at it from opposite directions. They are both focused in finding meaning in what we do. For McChrystal a large part of it was in his “corporate job.” For McCann, it’s outside that corporate job. The corporate job is just a platform enabling people to find meaning in other places. It […]
It Isn’t Just Buying That’s Hard…
There’s been huge amounts of very good research on the how hard buying is. We’ve learned about regret, FOMO, FOMU, abandoned buying efforts. I’ve contributed thousands of words in articles focusing on the difficulty buyers have in buying. But let’s look at this differently. It isn’t just buying that’s hard, all project/change work is hard. Just look within your own organizations and the major change projects, particularly those cross functional initiatives. The majority of these projects fail! It has little to do with buying, it’s more about the difficulty we/organizations have in these change initiatives. Research report after research report […]
The AI Industrial Revolution
We are enamored with AI. Everyone is experimenting, everyone is declaring they are “AI first.” AI is being integrated into as many workflows as possible. It’s writing our emails, cranking out thousands of emails faster than any individual could. It’s cleaning our inboxes, updating our CRMs, managing our calendars, doing our call prep. Agentic AI now completely takes over entire workflows, answering customer emails, handling calls, doing outreach. Not only are these agents cheaper, they don’t need coffee or bathroom breaks, vacations, and they don’t slack off or complain. Most or our focus on AI today is about one of […]