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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
Pandemic Prospecting
I don’t mean to be insensitive to the challenges we all face in dealing with the COVID 19 pandemic. We all are struggling, individually, community-wise, and organizationally to stay healthy, to cope, and understand how to move forward. As we look at our own companies, every organization has had to reset their plans to adjust to the new realities presented by this global health and economic crisis. In many ways, the pandemic has created an opportunity rich environment for us. Our customers, like us, are struggling to understand, to cope, to develop strategies to move forward. Their issues are less […]
What Do Our Customers Care About Now?
We are experiencing the mother of all “trigger events.” No company, no community, no region is immune to the health and economic challenges created by the pandemic. We all have a compelling mandate to change. We–our people, our own organizations, our customers, our suppliers, our communities–are being forced to adapt and change. As much as some will resist the need to change, perhaps waiting things out, hoping things will get back to “the way they were before,” change has become mandatory. Our customers are facing issues they have never faced and may not have the tools, knowledge or expertise to […]
Not So Social Social Media
Over the past 5 or so years, it seems a large number of people think social media and social platforms are the future of sales and marketing. We’ve seen platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter skyrocket in terms of utilization. We (or at least I) get deluged with connection requests, followed by the inevitable prospecting messages. Our news feeds are filled with self promotional “insights,” and articles, as the authors fight for likes and comments. When they can’t get enough, they put people’s names into the comments, so their material pops up in the feeds of the people they’ve hijacked. […]
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 […]