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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
Why The “Obvious” Has Become Obvious
The current global health and economic crises have spawned 100’s of articles and webcasts about how sales, marketing, and business professionals should deal with the circumstances we find ourselves in. I’ve contributed my share of articles to that discussion. These articles all offer variants on the theme of, “What must we do to help our customers and our organizations manage through the current crises?” The good news, is the pandemic has forced a sudden recognition that the world, certainly selling, marketing, and business have changed, as a result we have to change and adapt. This “survival” mentality has driven a […]
Moving From Helpless To Helpful
There’s a certain feeling of helplessness we each feel as we look at the current global health crisis, things happening in our companies, in our communities, even with our families. We are all facing things few of us, individually or organizationally, have ever faced. We each are struggling to find answers and to make sense of what’s happening. We are trying to figure out how to move forward. This is actually a fascinating time, it’s tragic that it takes something like this to capture our attention, but there is so much we are/can be learning from this. We can’t figure […]
Thinking About “Conversational Intelligence”
Conversational intelligence is increasingly a hot topic, yet too often, it seems it’s more of an oxymoron. Just to be clear, for the purposes of this post, I’m talking about the application of AI/ML tools to analyze sales conversations, providing guidance to improve the quality of those conversations. We are in the early days of using conversational intelligence tools and understanding how to leverage them. Sadly, I think many of the suppliers of these tools are the one’s that most misunderstand the power and potential of these tools. As a result, they tend to provide guidance that’s not useful. We […]
Stop Wasting Money
In these difficult times, there is the very real need to reduce discretionary spending as much as possible. Every dollar we save in discretionary spending can be diverted to saving jobs. I’ve discovered a solution–a huge source of discretionary spending, that is virtually wasted. If we stop spending in this area, millions can be saved and much of that can be diverted to retaining jobs. Here’s the solution. Look at your technology stack for sales and marketing. Cancel your contracts for virtually 100% of the tools you are paying for. Divert that money into spending that has a higher impact. […]
Working From Home
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had friends, colleagues, clients calling and to talk about the trials and tribulations of working from home. We’ve shared funny stories, frustrations, and swapped hints and tricks. Some people have been asking me for hints/tricks about working from home, knowing that I have had a home office for the past 20+ years. I hardly feel qualified, since typically on Monday mornings I jump on an airplane to go to a client location. Prior to the “Shelter In Place” rules in California (supplemented by common sense and good judgment), I normally work from my […]
What’s Next, Moving Forward
We are still in the midst of the global health and economic crisis, yet many of the conversations I’m hearing are focused on “what’s next.” Some people talk refer to what’s next as, “when things get back to normal.” Implicitly thinking what we are going through is a momentary interruption, and, at some point, we are back to doing business and interacting socially in the same ways we were doing as little as a few months ago. It’s not unusual to think about, “when things get back to normal.” As we look at past history, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, earthquakes (in […]