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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
“A PhD In Your Pocket Is Worthless Without This…”
“Like having a team of PhD level experts in your pocket,” is attributed to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The problem is, just because we have access to this level of knowledge doesn’t mean we know how to use it. It doesn’t mean we know how to test it for reasonability or possible hallucinations. This is nothing new. How many GTM professionals read Harvard Business Review, think about the content, and adapt it to what they are trying to do? How many professionals regularly consult sources like Google Scholar, the Library of Congress, ProQuest, ResearchGate, and others? All of these resources […]
Being An “Expert” Without Knowing Anything!
Everyday, I see fascinating offers in my feeds or in emails. I get endless offers for cheatsheets, mini-books, and proven playbooks. Just recently: “10 foolproof outbound email techniques,” “Master [Insert your favorite methodology] with this cheatsheet.” “Your first 90 days as CRO,” “Killer demo tricks and techniques.” I read them. They aren’t wrong. But they are not great, they aren’t differentiated, they don’t spark one’s imagination. One CRO guide had me sitting behind screens, reading reports, and rolling out new processes. Concepts like, “Get to know your customers and team” showed up exactly twice. Yet in every executive role I’ve […]
What Are You Stopping?
The one common theme across virtually everyone I talk to is they are overloaded, overwhelmed, time-poor. It doesn’t matter whether they are a SDR, marketer, customer service rep, rev-ops person, AE/AM, manager or a senior executive. They are overwhelmed! One would think with all the AI tools that do so much of the work for us, that this would become more manageable. That we would free up time, able to focus on more impactful work. But that doesn’t seem to be happening, in fact it appears to be the opposite, we have one more set of technologies, one more set […]
“We Need This Order By The End Of The Quarter….”
We are driven by our need to book orders and meet our goals. To do this, we often try to “entice” the customer into a deal. “If we get the order by the end of the quarter, we will give you a 10% discount….” In reality, the only time this ever works is when the customer has already decided to make a decision by the end of the quarter. All we’ve done is given away some revenue. We haven’t convinced them to buy earlier. Our urgency is absolutely irrelevant to the customer! Yet we consistently sell based on our schedules, […]
Automating Meaningless Work!
We continue to be enamored with all the things AI does for us. We feel productive because AI speeds up drafting emails, doing reporting, transcribing meeting notes, managing our calendars, doing our research. Then we are astounded, not just with the tasks we no longer have to do, but with the way AI amplifies these tasks. It just doesn’t automate the work, but it enables us to scale this work at levels that had been unimaginable. Seeing the volume of things it does for us, create an illusion of progress. But too often, what we are doing is just scaling […]
Our Customers’ Jobs Are Not To Understand Us And What We Do!
We spend a lot of our time trying to make our customers understand our products and what they do. We want them to understand how our products solve their problems. We want them to see why our solutions are superior to what they are currently doing, or the alternatives they are considering. The problem with this is that’s not their job! It’s not their job to understand us and what we do, it’s our job to understand them. When we force our customers to understand us, most won’t take the time. They are consumed with doing their day jobs. They […]