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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
It Doesn’t Get Easier!
I seldom respond to “viral videos.” But I was struck by this video of Kara Lawson, Duke Women’s Basketball Head Coach, Handle Hard Better. It is human nature to want things to be easier. In 2005, Staples ran a marketing campaign featuring the “Easy Button.” The concept went viral–the thought that if we just did one thing, things after that would be easy. This thinking seems to persist today, dominating much of what we seek in our work. If we do “this technique,” everything becomes easy. And these collections of techniques cover every aspect of what we do in selling. […]
And The Insanity Continues…….
Actually, I’m surprised it’s taken this long. People, including me, have been experimenting with ChatGPT. It’s an exciting tool, offering interesting potential. But, I’ve been waiting for the people to exploit this tool to fill our inboxes and feeds with “junk.” And we are starting to see the “experts/gurus” giving advice about how ChatGPT can be used to generate more and more content. These experts offer us the magic tricks to get ChatGPT to generate endless content with which to fill inboxes. So I decided to do an experiment: Dave asks ChatGPT: “What are different questions I could be asking […]
Can You Answer These Two Questions?
This is Pop Quiz, answer these two questions—choose any of your important customers to think about the answers: How does your customer make money? How do your customers think? These are two fundamental questions–they are what dominates your customers’ thinking. To engage our customers in business relevant conversations, we have to be able to answer and talk about these two questions. Some of you may be thinking, “Dave, this is easy, they sell stuff and get revenues from those sales……” But that doesn’t answer the question of, “How do customers make money?” There are hundreds of things the customers must […]
Have We Become Complacent?
I’m a great fan of Jeffrey Phillips writing on all aspects of innovation. Recently, he wrote an intriguing post, Will You Shape Innovation Or Will It Shape You? It’s fascinating and a few sentences in the middle of the post struck me, getting my mind spinning on a question for sellers, “Have we become complacent?” Since we are approaching year-end, it’s often a time to sit back and reflect. Think about the issue and your own selling organizations. We have plenty of evidence that might indicate we have, perhaps unwittingly, become complacent. At least 10 years of a relatively robust […]
Selling Is So Tough!!!
I was struck by a post by Steve Hall on LinkedIn. Steve and I share a similar sense of humor and perspectives on selling. It’s funny, over the years, I never really heard a lot of complaining about how tough selling is, at least until recently. Of course, we have always been morally obligated to whine about our quotas when they are assigned. We are should be disappointed when we lose a deal that we have worked so hard on. We get frustrated when we are trying to make things happen, but they don’t. We get impatient with what seems […]
And The Insanity Continues……
We seem to be in a continued death spiral with our customer engagement strategies. I recently read a post, Why Buyer Engagement Is Harder Than Ever And 4 Ways To Improve It. While I’m a great fan of Gartner and the research, I had mixed feeling about this post. I guess the best ways to characterize my reactions are: Well Duuugggghhhh…….. And…….. Oh Shit!!! We’ve known, for ages, that Buyers Don’t Want To Talk To Sellers! It’s now up to 72% that prefer a rep-free experience, and I anticipate this to increase in the coming year. We’ve known the number […]