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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
Are You Really Differentiated?
We all know the importance of differentiation. If we aren’t differentiated from the alternatives, how does the customer choose? If we can’t create differentiation, price becomes the differentiator. Years ago, the primary differentiator seemed to be our products/solutions. We sought to demonstrate the superiority of our offers by the capabilities we offered in our solutions. But we’ve learned product based differentiation is table stakes. We’ve learned the customer’s all of the alternatives on the customer short list will solve their problems. Of course there are nuances and differences, but too often, these are irrelevant to the customer. We try to […]
Which Sales Methodology?
I’ve gone through training in countless sales methodologies. Our own company has developed and implemented sales methodologies used by thousands of sales people–though all of our work is customized to the strategies, priorities, culture/values of the organizations we work with. Today, I read an article that was a high level assessment of 21 sales methodologies. I admire the author in taking the time. Several things struck me: The approach for most of these, regardless of how politely the suppliers phrase them, tends to be: “Here are the things we do to the customer….” They focused on our selling activities and […]
Leadership Is About Making Choices
I have to confess, this article was provoked reading the newspaper about the upcoming elections. Many “leaders,” political and otherwise, are making statements. Some are choosing not to vote, one feels that a write in vote for “Ronald Reagan” demonstrates his leadership and thoughtfulness. While it’s been those incidents that got me thinking about the issue, I reflected on so many situations I see in business. Too often, I see leaders failing to make decisions, failing to take action to address issues that impact organizational performance. For example, too often, we see leaders failing to take action on people issues. […]
Back To Basics
I saw an article in my newsfeed by McKinsey: How European marketing and sales leaders handle COVID-19’s effects. In reading it, I was underwhelmed. There was nothing really new, what they were talking about was really sound leadership and management practice—COVID crisis or not. Reflecting on it, I realized, perhaps that’s the point! Basic principles, thoughtful leadership, sharp execution always work! Contexts change–but these basics always enable people and the organization to respond and adapt much more quickly. What the COVID crisis, or any crisis for that matter, has done is made visible our bad practice. It’s made them visible […]
LinkedIn Automation At It’s Worst!
LinkedIn is fast becoming as useless as many of the other social channels. Most of it is not LinkedIn’s fault—though it’s algorithm seems to favor “Broems.” It’s really the fault of those selling training and LinkedIn automation tools that seek not to create value in relationships, but only to deluge people with mindless messages. Below is a message stream I just received. The only editing I have done is to disguise the sender. It’s unbelievable, I get one of the standard, “Here’s what we do/sell, I’d like to arrange a meeting to see how we can help you.” Where normally, […]
Mistakes Will Be Made….
Too often, we live in fear of failure. We live in fear of making mistakes. In spite of this, mistakes will be made. Too often, bad leaders punish those that have made mistakes, never tolerating failure. In spite of this, mistakes will be made. If we fear making mistakes, we do nothing, because if we did something, we might make a mistake. We revert to what we have always done, ironically, even if it isn’t working as well in the past. We wait and respond, so we don’t make a mistake, when that waiting may have been the mistake. We […]