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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
What Are Our Signals Really Signalling?
Leveraging buyer signals has become a fascinating topic in trying to understand buyer intent. Where before we relied on people responding to an email, accepting a meeting invitation, inviting others to the meeting as being signals indicating interest and, sometimes, intent. Now we can monitor tens of thousands of signals. We can look at every outreach across every channel to people in an organization. We can monitor opens, forwards, re-opens. We can monitor downloads and shares. We can look at every website hit. We can look at the complete past history of all of these. Taken individually, they may not […]
If We Sell Change, Why Don’t We Change?
The whole purpose of every GTM organization is to convince our customers to change. Whether it’s a new way of doing things, an ability to address a new opportunity, or replacing what they currently use with our own products. Everything we do is oriented around helping our customers challenge the status quo, build the case for action, create urgency, manage risk, develop confidence in their change initiative. Yet when we go back to our own organizations, we continue to do things the same way we always have done them. The same approach to market, the same emails, the same calls, […]
Are You Modeling Or Telling?
My father had an expression: “Do as I say, not as I do.” Usually, it surfaced I was at my most obnoxious. When he called me on it, I’d fire back, “Well, you do the same thing!” He’d patiently try to show me the error of my ways, how I might change. But I was a difficult kid. I’d keep arguing, taunting him with the unfairness of it. (The truth is, his lapses were rare—almost always a moment when he was frustrated or worn thin. I just had a talent for cataloging them.) He only said “Do as I say, […]
What If You Only Had 10 Accounts?
I was doing a thought experiment with a team a few days ago. I thought I’d extend it to this audience. Before I do, I recently listened to an interview with Christopher Nolan about his latest movie, The Odyssey. They were filming the whole thing in IMAX, which presented monstrous problems for the speaking parts of the production. In considering how he addressed it he said, “The limitations give everybody a focus.” File that away as we walk through the exercise. The team sold software-based technology tools. While their performance was reasonable, it wasn’t where they wanted it to be. […]
Let’s Stop It With Value Propositions!
Yes, that picture is me. Just got awarded my MBA at UCLA. A week later I was in Manhattan, starting my job at IBM. I was, and still am, awkward. A slightly nerdy guy. In the evenings I started doing what every single man in Manhattan did. I started hanging about in bars, hoping to meet women. As I walked to a bar, I’d be thinking of ways to proposition women I would encounter. I’d come up with lines. Brilliant things like: “Hey girl, I work for big Blue, but you won’t be blue with me…” “My customer is Chase […]
Surrendering My Thinking To Claude
At the outset of this article, I want to acknowledge my arrogance. Many of you might have come to the same conclusion, independently. I won’t apologize for it, because I think it is the backbone of this entire article. By background, I have always thought of myself, and been recognized as a very smart person. At times a deep thinker, at times a big thinker. And, if I’m honest, every once in a while a “whacko.” Most of my career has been built both my ability to think through things and to help others think through things. Now that I’ve […]
