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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
“I Never Lost A Deal Because Of Objection Handling….”
My thought partner, Lahat Tzvi, and I were having our monthly conversation today. We started discussing much of what we see about the “secrets to sales success.” We both see guru’s posting the determining secret to success. Somehow that secret is related to what they sell. They make claims about improving objection handling, improving closing, more effective discovery, better prospecting, better value creation, winning deal strategies, high impact sales calls, better……. The perspective is, “Master this one thing and you will double your win rate or improve your ability to hit plan or maximize your comp.” These things are important——rather, […]
Are You Solving The Wrong Problem?
We need more leads! We need more activity! We need more demos/meetings! We need more pipeline! We need more tools! We need more people! We need better products! We need better pricing! We need more funding! We need………. Too often, we focus on the symptoms of problems and not the problems themselves. And when we only address the symptoms, the problems persist. Often, they get worse. We, often, end up doing more of what doesn’t work. Until we start understanding the root causes of our problem, getting underneath the symptoms, we will never begin to solve the problems. But what […]
There Will Always Be Excuses!
I was listening to my friend Matt Heinz. He said something obvious, yet profound, “Every day there is an excuse.” There has always been and will continue to be any number of reasons to make excuses. We’ve seen the rapid change, disruption create new reasons for excuses. This week, we see global economic turmoil. And then there is always AI. More locally, we have or can create many more excuses. Our products aren’t competitive, we don’t have enough people, we don’t have enough of the right people, our pricing is noncompetitive, our goals are unreasonable, we don’t have the right […]
Profiles In Courage
When I was in junior high, we read the Pulitzer Prize winning book by former President, John F. Kennedy. This was in the late ’60’s. The book offered short stories of acts of bravery by 8 Senators, going back through history. There’s some controversy surrounding the book, but at that age it was fascinating to read. And, at the time, outside our classrooms were protests about the Vietnam War. Yesterday, I was astounded to see a completely different demonstration of Profiles In Courage. Perhaps millions of people gathered in their towns to protest the acts of our government. I happened […]
Judgment…..
I haven’t written much about Judgment, nor do I see many others writing about it. Ironically, Judgment is probably one of the most important capabilities for leaders and business professionals. It’s importance is magnified as we look at the escalating disruption, change, and complexity each of us, our teams, our organizations, our customers, and our partners face. It’s a skill to help us make decisions when there are no cut and dry answers, where we may have incomplete information, where there may be massive uncertainty. There is no roadmap to making and executing the best decisions. It’s the constant application […]
Someone Else Is Creating Your To-Do List!
No, I’m not going to talk about the latest/greatest way we can leverage AI to manage our calendars. What I’m focusing on is how little control most people are exercising over their own to-do lists. Sadly, perhaps unconsciously, we have ceded control of our to-do lists to our inboxes, text messages, calls, and social channels. As much as we try to leverage effective time management and time blocking techniques, others are controlling our to-do lists. We have so many conflicting demands on our time, too often we don’t have the time to do the things most important to us. Recently, […]