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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
Feedback On Everything Is Feedback On Nothing
I keep seeing the same story, told with minor variations, across my feeds. A team deploys an AI tool that captures every activity: every call, email, meeting. The tool reviews everything, analyzes everything, generates feedback and recommendations on each activity. The author, usually the developer of the tool, brags: “Setup took minutes. No engineers, no integration project….” And then they go through the math. They portray a manager, perhaps with 8-10 sellers, each sending hundreds of emails a day, making dozens of calls, sitting in several meetings. No manager could possibly review everything that’s being done and do the complete […]
Where’s The Differentiation?
We have all sat through the same conversation. The customer has built their short list. Three alternatives, maybe four. We’re one of them. And as we look at the list, if we are honest with ourselves, we know any of these solutions will solve the customer’s problem. The features overlap. The functions are the same. Whatever gaps exist in one offering will be eliminated in the next release. Whatever advantage we thought we had this quarter will be eliminated next quarter. Each of us has seen this in virtually every deal we work. We struggle, thinking, “how do we differentiate […]
Doing The Work
We tend to treat performance problems as knowledge problems. If the results are disappointing, surely the people don’t know what to do. So we train them again. We send them to another workshop, build another playbook, roll out another methodology, buy another tool. And then we are puzzled when nothing changes. But walk into almost any team that is struggling and ask the people what they should be doing. They will tell you. They know they should keep the CRM current. They know they should qualify against the ICP rather than chasing anything that moves. They know the difference between […]
“Don’t Follow Your Passion!”
Marc Andreessen recently offered career advice to young people. “Don’t follow your passion. Your passion is likely dumb and useless. Make it your hobby, not your work. Instead, find the hottest, most vibrant part of the economy and figure out how to contribute. Make yourself valuable, and increase that value every day.” At first glance, it seems sensible. We’ve all seen people do exactly what he describes, and many of them have built solid careers. But it is almost certainly not how Andreessen actually built his. He was a computer geek obsessed with networks, protocols, and the emerging shape of […]
Choosing The Easier Work And Calling It “Management”
Every day, I see new tools being announced. These tools, apparently, turn things upside down. We can see reports that were previously unimaginable. Examples of new reports and dashboards fill my inbox or social media feeds. AI is giving us the capability to keep our pipelines and forecasts updated with the latest changes in real time, giving us far more insight into performance. We now have the ability to have the most current pipeline and forecast on demand. And managers seem to be jumping all over this capability. They are captivated by the thought that of daily or even hourly […]
Fixing The “Noise” Does Not Fix The Problem
We’ve seen it before. The scenarios are different, but what lies beneath them is always the same. A crisis hits. A big customer leaves. A quarter gets missed. Key people quit. Something breaks. Leaders spring into action. The first reaction is always the same. “We have to fix the problem!” And the fix focuses on the one thing in front of us. The customer is leaving, so we offer a steeper discount. Key people are quitting, so we change the comp plan. We missed the quarter, so we double the pipeline goal. We react instead of think. The challenge is […]
