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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
What’s The Problem?
I was having a round table discussion with a bunch of sales people. They started by saying, “We sell solutions…..” “That’s interesting, tell me more. What do your solutions do?” I responded. They started to describe their solutions and products. They talked about the features and functions, they talked about the user interface and ease of use, they compared their solutions to competition, they even offered to give me a demo. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I meant, what problems do your solutions solve?” “They help improve our customers’ productivity and efficiency…..” one of the sellers said. “What does that mean,” […]
ChatGPT Just Wants To Make Us Happy… And That’s A Problem
Everyday, we see horrible applications of GenAI tools. And in a very large sense, it’s not the fault of the tools–even many of the hallucinations, they suffer from. It’s how we use these tools. Too often, we ask it do things for us, “Generate a prospecting letter…, Tell me how to handle an objection…., Write a response for me…” Responding to our requests, it does exactly what we ask it to do. It provides us the answers we ask for. If we limit our prompts to asking it do do things to improve our efficiency, or to answer our questions, […]
“Why I’m So Interested In Selling,” Cassi Roper
Preface: I met Cassi Roper a number of years ago. She ran EMEA Strategic Accounts for Redgate Software. She learned I was working with the North American teams in changing their approach to their markets and driving more aggressive sales growth. Curious, she came to the US to participate in strategy and other workshops, adapting what we were putting in place to her strategies in EMEA. We later looked at methods to ratchet up performance even further. Over the years she took more responsibility and is now the CRO. Cassi highlights a key issue many others have alluded to. There […]
“It’s Better To Look Good Than Be Good….”
Andy Paul and I were having what I’ve labeled “The Old Fart Conversations About Selling.” Neither of us feel we are out of touch with modern selling, the challenges both buyers and sellers face. Both of us embrace all sorts of technologies very quickly, as an example we both are actively developing AI based tools. Each of us talk to thousands of sellers and customers every year, and Andy’s podcasts reach 10s to 100s of thousands more. But every once in a while we get on a call to discuss “What’s happening in selling?” And we are totally bewildered by […]
Our Addiction To “Busyness,” Not Business
For my entire career, “we” are addicted to busyness. We seem to measure our worth by how we fill our calendars and that pleasant feeling of exhaustion at 10PM when we have finished a busy day. We revel in our ability to multitask, even though the data shows that multitasking makes us accomplish less. We derive great pleasure in looking at our calendars, seeing every minute packed with some sort of activity. And we feel we have accomplished huge amounts with each to-do, task, meeting we check off as complete. We can’t resist the skipping between multiple windows or apps […]
AI And Buyer Confidence
All credit for this post goes to Scott Gillum and his fantastic post: Why Relying on AI Won’t Improve Customer Experience. Reading it caused me to start reflecting on how much we misunderstand about AI and how we leverage it in selling. Without a doubt, AI will have a huge impact on both how we manage/lead our organizations and on how we effectively and efficiently engage our customers in their buying process. Having said that, I worry that we miss the most important parts of those experiences and misunderstand AI’s ability to address those. We don’t yet understand AI and […]