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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
“The Hard Part Is Where You Grow”
Yes, I’m a more than a little obsessed about our propensity to avoid the hard work, constantly hitting the “Easy Button,” but this is probably one of the most critical issues we face as individuals and within our organizations. I’ve written about one aspect of this–hitting the easy button is really about avoidance. Let me invert my thinking to look at “Why should we be looking at the hard parts?” The hard part isn’t some exercise in masochism or self flagellation. The hard part is where we learn, it’s where we start thinking differently. It’s where we start asking ourselves, […]
“How Are You Different?”
A colleague and I were discussing a question we all face. It’s the “How Are You Different” question. As we discussed it, two thoughts came to mind: Let me start with the second question. We are trained to respond to this question. We have endless checklists comparing features and functions. We compare our capabilities with those of our competitors, always designing the checklists to show that we have more features than our competitors. And they construct their own checklists, inevitably showing they have more features than we–though they have selected different features. We supplement those answers with, “Look at what […]
“Systems” Are People Interacting
When we look at our GTM strategies, ideally, we are leveraging systems thinking. We’re not just optimizing isolated functions or hitting departmental/individual KPIs, but designing how the whole organization works. We look at workflows, roles/responsibilities, OKRs, not just within the functions, but how they interact with other functions and the rest of the organization. Too often, we fail to do this, we tend to focus on the subsystems. We look at our function, our jobs, our part of the organization; optimizing our abilities to do those jobs and hit our KPIs, at the cost of the performance of the whole […]
Moving From “Doing More Things,” To “Doing Things That Matter More…”
We’ve been conditioned to think that productivity is driven by doing more things. We focus on scaling those things. Whether it’s more outreach, more prospecting, more meetings, more demos, more proposals, more pipeline. To do more, we look at tools, methods, hacks, that help us do more things. We add to our tech stacks. We hire more people. We discover new things like, LinkedIn prospecting and other social engagement, that create new things for us to do. AI is the latest, certainly not the last thing to add to the pile of doing more things. Scaling has become the underlying […]
Words And Language Matter
Every week, I’m speaking with clients and colleagues around the world. Clients in Europe, the Nordics, Franc, Germany, Spain, Italy, the UK. Clients in India, China, Japan, Korea and other countries. Clients in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Clients in Australia and New Zealand. And clients across North America. Fortunately, those conversations are usually conducted in English or a language I have at least passing fluency. Though I admit, my Australian colleagues keep throwing “Strine” at me—and I’m still trying to translate it into English. (I know my “Strine” friends will struggle with this post. There’s a “Strine” version at […]
Let Me Pose A Hypothetical Question…
What if we rethought our conversations–with our customers, with our own people? What if we thought, about why the best conversations don’t start with answers? Or they don’t start with agenda led questions? Or they may not start with an insight? What if we weren’t driven to focus on proving our value, convincing the customer about our POV, but were about exploring an issue together? What if we started with an idea, a theory, and engaged our customers in a collaborative conversation to explore, discover these ideas? I’m going to be talking about how we might lead with hypotheses. So […]