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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
They Know What I Need But They Have Never Spoken To Me
I still go through my morning routine of cleaning out my inbox. I’ve resisted having Claude it for me, partly because I learn a in skimming my inbox. Every morning I have over 100 emails in my in box. About 35% are clients/prospects and get a lot of attention. Another 15% are from Substack or other feeds I subscribe to. I skim a few and file the rest away for evening reading. 5% are offers from airlines or hotels I’ve used recently. The other 45% are people prospecting me. About 1 in every 200 is decent and provokes interest. But […]
Are We Using AI To Avoid Leading?
I was fascinated to read a recent WSJ article: Bosses Want the Secrets of the Family Firm That Never Had a Layoff in 75 Years. The Gund Company has grown an average of 18% a year for the past 10 years. And it’s done without any layoffs. It is a fascinating contrast to everything we read about business and leadership today. It’s all about AI. Too many discussions focus on how these tools dramatically improve efficiency, suggesting people are much less important in the future. We read of the human in the middle; that’s code for there will be humans […]
If You Couldn’t Talk About Your Product, Could You Have A High Impact Customer Conversation?
Often, I challenge clients with the following: “In your initial meetings with your prospects/customers, you can’t talk to them about your products or solutions! Even if they ask you?” The question inevitably arises, “Well what do we talk to them about?” And this is the critical issue. Can we only engage our customers in the things we want to talk about, our products and solutions? Or can we talk to customers about what they care about, their business, challenges, problems and opportunities? Our prospects and customers care the most about the latter. But can we hold our own in these […]
Success Is Our Greatest Obstacle To Growth!
This is inspired by a post from my good friend, Tobia La Marca. He wrote The Mastery Trap, it’s outstanding, please read it. As I reflected on his article, I started thinking, “This is about how we define success.” I moved on to the idea: “We confuse being successful with being as good as we can become.” We hit our numbers, we achieve our goals, we outperform our peers, we are the top performers awarded a trophy at the President’s Club. We see the same thing organizationally. Our products are the top-ranked products. The market research companies rank our products […]
Can Your People Talk With Your Customer?
Reading the title, many of you may be scratching your heads, thinking, “Dave, of course they talk to customers. We measure it every day. What’s the deal?” There are two critical words in this title. The first is “Can,” the second is “With.” Let me start with “with” before I address can. I know it’s a wording difference, but it’s the difference that completely changes the conversation. I’m suggesting we talk “with” customers, rather than talking “at” or “to” customers. It’s a huge and important difference. Traditionally, we’ve focused on presenting and pitching. Our discovery calls look like interrogations, as […]
The Cost Of Judgment
I struggled to write this post. At first I tried to parse good, bad, abdicated judgment. The cost of compliance versus the cost of developing our capabilities. It became a very complex discussion, something resembling ROI analysis, except without the numbers. The argument became very abstract. After a few drafts, I finally realized I was making everything too complex. I realized the cost of judgment is really about finding out what each of us is capable of. It’s really about the future, one we can never know. The cost of judgment is developing our ability to handle it when the […]
