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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
“Make Your Competitors Look Silly,” And Other Nonsense.
Another piece of nonsense by a guru found its way into my feed today. It started with, “The secret to pitching isn’t making yourself look good, it’s making your competitors look silly.” It was followed by one a 21 page carousel outlining how to make your competitors look silly. And, as usual, 100’s of likes and comments, “The secret to success!” It is pure nonsense. Interestingly, the focus of attention from this expert is the competitor and not the customer. I always thought I the focus of our efforts was on our customers! But in the 21 pages of wisdom […]
The New LinkedIn
I’m a very early subscriber to LinkedIn. A friend was one of the early VCs funding LinkedIn. He told me about it and asked me to sign up as a user. In the early days, it seemed to be more of an online CV, but pretty quickly became very interesting for the discussions I found. There were groups with interesting discussions, in my feed there were always diverse article that I could learn from. Often, I learned more from the comments and discussions following the articles. Authors would participate in these discussions, debates would be conducted. I learned so much […]
Self Centeredness, Arrogance, And Disdain
I’m compelled to write. It’s lunch, my habit as I eat my lunch is to scroll my LI feed. Fortunately, I have a strong stomach, so reading the feed seldom creates indigestion. But in the space of 5 minutes I saw two important posts. In different ways, calling out bad behaviors. The first was a well intended person. He described sitting on a plane overhearing someone talking about how much she disliked sales people. This person was offended, needing to write a chest thumping piece about the greatness of sales people. He highlighted our hustle, grind, relentlessness, discipline, focus, resilience. […]
Thanks AI, I’ll Keep Maintaining My Calendar……
We’ve seen the 100s of articles, the 100s of prompts, the 100s of cheat sheets focused on saving our time. Theoretically, I don’t have to manage my calendar, to-do lists, follow ups, anything. I don’t have to worry about the responses to queries, or the follow ups to the meetings. All that time spent on these and other tasks is automated, freeing up time to be “more productive.” For those who know me, I’m obsessed with my personal productivity. I’m always an early adopter to tools that help make me more productive. But there’s actually very little of these AI […]
Meeting Commitments
On Friday, I realized I had failed at something—miserably. A few weeks ago, I met with a great team. We had an exciting project, we agreed on the action plan and next steps. This action plan was highly dependent on some things I committed to. Two and a half weeks passed. The person leading the project reached out, “Dave, we’d like a follow up meetings, but we are missing some stuff…….” I was ashamed. I missed meeting a commitment. As a result it slowed us down. I dropped everything, quickly completed my work. But we’ve lost a little time, and […]
“I Can Do It Better Than Them…..”
Marcus Cauchi has been writing a provocative series of posts on mistaken sales management behaviors. The posts and discussion are fantastic, make sure you read them. He asked for my thinking on the issue. We see all sorts of bad management behaviors. Some of it seems to be driven by a compulsion to “help” our people succeed. Much of it is driven by a lack of trust managers have in their people. Almost all if it is driven by the mindset, “We have to make our numbers.” Too many managers have a “Superperson” complex. They were, possibly, great sellers and […]