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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
“That Guest” At The Get-Together…..
I hate being trite with this analogy, but I will. My post “Cold Calling Was Never ‘Alive’” generated a lot of interesting questions and conversation. They were variations on the same theme, “I need to get to these people to tell them how we can help them….. I need to share our experience in working with customers like them….. I need to schedule a demo of what we do……” Repeating myself: Customers don’t care about it until they do! Yet this is where we always start with our outreach. Let me try to attack this issue with a different analogy. […]
“We Are Human Beings First, …..
One of my favorite musicians is Yo Yo Ma. I was listening to an interview of him, he was reflecting on his mentor, Pablo Casals. Casals was probably the best cellist of his time. Yo Yo Ma quoted Casals, “I think of myself as a human being first, a musician second, a cellist third.” It’s something we must reflect on and constantly remind ourselves of. In the press of everyday business, in our busyness in getting things done. In our focus on scaling, growth, results, too often, we lose the view that we are all human beings first. We target […]
“Rearranging The Deck Chairs”
Yesterday, I was privileged to sit in a discussion with a number of SaaS founders and sales executives. We were talking about organizing the GTM functions to maximize performance. It was a fascinating discussion. It’s also like so many discussions I see, with all sorts of organizations. These discussions focus on how we structure and organize to drive higher levels of performance. Over the years, we’ve seen the development of different organizational models on the GTM side of organizations. There were the traditional silos of sales, marketing, customer service, and others. And within each of those silos were subsilos, for […]
Settling…..
This morning, clearing my inbox and feeds, I noticed a headline. It referred to the average tenure of GTM executives being 17 months….. The article offered sound advice on how to deal with a career living in 17 month increments. My thought, in reading this was, “Why do we settle for this? Why do we consider this acceptable? Wouldn’t we and the organizations we lead achieve much more with longer tenures?” Then I reflected on how much we “settle” for. We rationalize these with all sorts of excuses, “That’s just the way things are…., But we are hitting our numbers…, […]
Celestial Navigation And Sales Leadership
When I was a kid, my father taught me how to sail. At first I sailed in racing dinghy’s never far from the shore. In high school, we graduated to cruising boats. While we never intended to do oceanic cruising, but the shoreline was beyond sight, and one of the challenges was knowing where we were and if we were going in the right direction. My dad’s solution to this was to teach me celestial navigation. I learned how to use the tools like sextants, compasses, and plot our course on maps with dividers. I thought all of this was […]
Prompt Engineering For Sellers
Before I get into this article, credit for the idea comes from a conversation with my friend, Jack Malcolm. Thanks for provoking the idea. The term, “prompt engineering,” is relatively new to most of us. While software developers and AI specialists have understood the concept for year, it’s very new for the rest of the world. But as the LLMs have emerged and grown, the concepts of prompt engineering are starting to fill our feeds. We now have lists of AI generated prompts for just about any scenario, “Generate a prospecting email for this…., How do I handle this objection…, […]