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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
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 […]
Time Isn’t The Scarce Resource
For years, we have treated time as the scarce resource. For most sellers and leaders, the scarce resource is judgment and attention. Stated differently, we have misunderstood what productivity means. I’m deluged daily with prospecting emails and things in my feed about “saving time.” For years, we’ve had increasing automation, mostly oriented to saving time. Today, I get pitched AI products that save time. I don’t have to take the time to do research or prep before that customer call. I don’t have to do the follow ups or action plans. I don’t have to update CRM. And there is […]
Sensemaking V2.0
For years, we’ve known our customers are overwhelmed with information. Where information scarcity had been a problem, which caused customers to invite sellers into their offices, for the past 10-15 years, it’s been the opposite. Customers are overwhelmed. Sensemaking was created for sellers to help customers deal with the information overload. It enabled sellers to sit down with customers to help them filter through things, focusing on the information that was most important for their situation. We are facing another “overwhelm” moment, which creates a need for Sensemaking 2.0. But this time, it’s not our customers facing information overwhelm, it’s […]
Mindsets, Behaviors, Judgment…..
In “Is Good Enough Good Enough,” I introduced the fundamental mindsets and behaviors for sales excellence. What do these have to do with developing our judgment? In some sense, it’s a chicken and egg discussion. Our mindsets and behaviors impact our judgment, and our judgments impact our mindsets and behaviors. It constantly runs both ways. For people who haven’t read the book or this whole series, let me lay some groundwork for this discussion. The book established 8 mindsets and behaviors critical to excellence. These were: Curiosity, commitment to continued learning, customer centricity, ability to deal with ambiguity/uncertainty, accountability, discipline, […]
“You Can’t Handle The Truth!”
One of my all-time favorite movie scenes is in A Few Good Men. It’s Jack Nicholson on the stand shouting, “You can’t handle the truth!” It came up the other day when Bob Apollo and I were talking about truth, honesty, and trust in business, sales, and society (we tend to wander in our conversations.) In the movie, Tom Cruise, as Lt Daniel Kaffee, is getting testimony from Nicholson’s character, Colonel Nathan Jessup. Kaffee’s question drove the response from Colonel Jessup. When we hear him say, “You can’t handle the truth,” we begin to think he is starting to tell […]
Leadership And Judgment
We’ve all been in the meeting. It’s a standard deal review. The manager sits with the seller, both looking at the dashboard, rather than each other. The are reviewing the deal, MEDDICC steps checked off, process being followed. Maybe a few questions about what the customer is saying, and how the salesperson is handling things. Some updates are made in CRM. Perhaps, next steps are agreed on. 30 minutes, the meeting is over. The manager goes back to the dashboard; the seller goes back to spraying and praying. A status review. What did the manager learn? What did the seller […]
