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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
“If You Can’t Do It Yourself……”
“If you can’t do it yourself, you probably shouldn’t be using AI!” This was a brilliant observation by James Pursey in an outstanding seminar on AI in sales. The only modification I would make would be to say, “If you can’t do it excellently yourself, you probably shouldn’t be using AI!” James gets at the root of so many of the issues we see about the terrible use of LLMs in selling, marketing, customer service. We all have been the subject of the most horrible LLM generated emails, social media conversations, AI generated posts. Many have fallen victim to misstatements/hallucinations […]
Doing Our People’s Jobs……
One of the biggest mistakes I see too many managers make, is they dive in and start doing their people’s jobs. The motivations for this range from being well intended to malicious. We have all seen the managers believing they are the best sales people in the world, sweeping their people aside, playing “Superseller” in important customer calls. We see managers impatient with their people saying, “I can get this done faster….” We see well intended managers saying, “This is new, something we’ve never done before, I can probably get it done better than the people responsible for getting it […]
Coaching Our Customers
I recently wrote an updated version of “What Is Coaching?” In it, I focused on how leaders coach and develop their people. At the end of the article, I had and Afterword, suggesting the same principles used in high impact coaching within our own organizations should be applied in working with our customers. I want to do a deeper dive in this article. Rather than repeat all the things about what coaching is and isn’t, how we effectively coach, I’ll summarize three key areas here, but for the details go back to the What is Coaching article: When we look […]
What Is Coaching?
It seems the word “Coaching” has become one of those fashionable words, permeating every discussion. Go back 15 or more years, and we barely saw the word coaching. Today, we find coaching applying to about everything we do, both in business and in our personal lives. We see Executive Coaching, Career Coaching, Life Coaching, Performance Coaching, Business Coaching, Health/Wellness Coaching, Agile/Team Coaching, Sales Coaching, Spiritual Coaching, Dietary Coaching, and on an on and on. Endless “influencers” in social media claim to be providing coaching, where all they are really doing is broadcasting. There is the concept of coaching for virtually […]
Do You Know Your Customers’ Personal Objectives?
“Behind every business objective is the fulfillment of a personal objective.”* In our discovery process, if we conduct a discovery, we seek to understand the customers’ business objectives. “What problem are they solving, why is it important to solve it, what are the risks of solving/not solving it…….” And we focus the presentation of our solutions in terms of how it addresses the business objectives. Perhaps it’s a value proposition, an ROI, or something else. But underlying those business reasons, basically those things that impact their function and the work they do are personal objectives. It may be as simple […]
AI Isn’t The Selling Point!
Recently, I was coaching a seller on a critical call he was about to make. His strategy to engage the CRO was to lead with AI and the capabilities it enabled in the product he was selling. “Why are you leading with this,” I asked. “I’ve noticed in my research that he talks a lot about AI, I thought that would be a good way to engage him!” replied the seller. “I get it, his company sells software products, and they are making a big deal about AI, but is that the reason he should want to talk to you? […]