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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
Words And Language Matter
Every week, I’m speaking with clients and colleagues around the world. Clients in Europe, the Nordics, Franc, Germany, Spain, Italy, the UK. Clients in India, China, Japan, Korea and other countries. Clients in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Clients in Australia and New Zealand. And clients across North America. Fortunately, those conversations are usually conducted in English or a language I have at least passing fluency. Though I admit, my Australian colleagues keep throwing “Strine” at me—and I’m still trying to translate it into English. (I know my “Strine” friends will struggle with this post. There’s a “Strine” version at […]
Let Me Pose A Hypothetical Question…
What if we rethought our conversations–with our customers, with our own people? What if we thought, about why the best conversations don’t start with answers? Or they don’t start with agenda led questions? Or they may not start with an insight? What if we weren’t driven to focus on proving our value, convincing the customer about our POV, but were about exploring an issue together? What if we started with an idea, a theory, and engaged our customers in a collaborative conversation to explore, discover these ideas? I’m going to be talking about how we might lead with hypotheses. So […]
Selling Isn’t Easy, So Why Do We Keep Hitting The Easy Button?
We all know that selling is hard. It’s not just that buyers are overwhelmed, it’s not just the disruption/change everyone faces, it’s not the unpredictability we and our customers face. Just doing it right takes effort. Focus, discipline, mastery, relentless execution. Knowing this, why do we keep looking for the shortcuts? Why do we look for the hacks, so we don’t have to put in the effort? Why do we look for AI and other tools to do this work for us? Why do we chase speed, volume, velocity over skill? Why do we prize templates, scripts, playbooks over critical […]
“8 Hours Of Work In 20 Minutes”
I used to think I was productive. Then I discovered how much more productive I could be–like how I use AI tools like ChatGPT. At least that’s what of one of LinkedIn’s many AI/Sales gurus has taught me. This individual has decided AI is key to our success (I don’t disagree). In his work and continued brilliant insights, he shares how he condenses hours of work into minutes of game changing insight. I’ve spent the majority of my career building and leading organizations. Some have been very large, $ billions-thousands of people. Some have been early stage, and many in […]
When Verbs Turn To Nouns
John Dougan posted something interesting on LinkedIn (There is so little interesting in LI that I treasure the moments when I find something.). It was his struggle with the word Enablement and the concept of what Sales Enablement has become. And John runs sales enablement at a great organization. It got me thinking about something I see happening too much in everything we do in our GTM and customer entanglement strategies. Here’s the basic premise: “What happens when our “verbs” become “nouns,” What happens when we move from “actions” to “structures?” Let’s use the verb “enabling” as an example. When […]
Close But No Cigar…..
According to ChatGPT, the term, “Close but no cigar,” originated in the 1920s-30s. Apparently at carnivals and fairs, cigars were given out as prizes for things like shooting galleries, ring toss, dart games and so forth. When someone missed the mark, the carnie would yell, “Close but no cigar.” We’ve seen the term used for some harrowing moments. In 1999, the NASA Mars Climate Orbiter disintegrated in Mars atmosphere. $327 M down the tubes. Turned out one team was using imperial units in their calculations for the design, the other was using metric units—close but no cigar. In 2012, there […]