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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
Busy Or Productive?
Early in my career, I kept hearing senior leaders saying something to the effect of, “If I want to get something done, I’m going to give it to the busiest person in my organization….” I’m not quite quoting it in the right context, at the time, the busiest people seemed to be the most productive people. Fast forward to today. Everyone is busy! Or at least seem to present themselves as busy. We are overwhelmed with information and tasks. Despite all the productivity tools we have, despite the ability to search to quickly get information, despite the ability to leverage […]
The “Tell Me More” Problem
LLMs are providing sellers the opportunity to reshape their engagement strategies. Ideally, enabling higher impact first conversations. We can ask the LLM to research the organization, identifying the key issues the company is facing. We can ask the LLM to write a relevant prospecting letter focusing on a certain persona. We can ask it to script a conversation we’d like to have with the customer. And, somewhat surprisingly, the quality of these scripts can be pretty good. We now have the ability, rather than starting with a product pitch, to engage our prospects and customers in a conversation that is […]
Why Do We Find “Objections” So Objectionable?
“Objections,” more specifically, “Objection Handling” have been a fundamental part of sales training, probably since the first sale. I can imagine Adam saying to Eve, “But that’s not a Granny Smith, I prefer those…..” Fear strikes at the heart of too many sellers. “This call will be great as long as they don’t bring up these issues?” Sellers do everything they can to avoid objections. Sometimes they finesse them, sometimes they just can’t answer them. Our mindset about objections tends to be combative, it’s the customer resisting our pitches, objections are something to overcome. We study all sorts of techniques […]
AI Will Not Be The Differentiator…….
As with any new technology, we rush to leverage it, thinking the fact that we are leveraging it becomes a differentiating capability. Just look at how many technology companies are trumpeting their incorporation of AI in their products. Marketing materials, sales pitches, everything is, “We are using AI! We have incorporated ChatGPT (insert the name of your favorite LLM), We are doing…..!” Suddenly the AI has become what separates their products from others. And, as we look through the history of technology disruptions, we’ve seen similar things. But within the next couple of years, AI won’t be the differentiator. It […]
“This Is Just The Way Things Are…….”
I have to confess huge frustration with too many of the conversations I see in my social feeds. People take a position, leveraging (perhaps cherry picking) data to support their premises. While, their arguments make sense–obviously, they’ve structured them to make sense, but they are fundamentally flawed. Most of the time, they are just defenses of the status quo. And it’s ironic, because too often they think they are presenting deep insights and “aha” moments. But they justify their insights through defending the status quo. For example, recently I got into a “discussion” with someone arguing the importance of volume […]
More Meetings Or Better Meetings?
O Meetings are critical to achieving our performance goals! It is through these meeting, whether F2F, virtual, phone, that we engage our customers, helping them navigate their buying/problem solving process. So it stands to reason, that more meetings would drive higher levels of performance. To increase our attainment, we just need to conduct more meetings. And for many, achieving meeting goals is a critical performance metric. We know how many meetings we have to conduct to find and qualify a deal. The math to get 10 new qualified deals is easy. We can now set goals for meetings, doing the […]