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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
Simplification…….
It’s trite to say we live in worlds of growing complexity. The rates of change and disruption seem to be accelerating. Global competition, new technologies, new business models, new market opportunities both create challenge and opportunity. Workloads seem to sky rocket as do demands on our time. Distractions whether device based, app based or self inflicted consume our time. And it would be unrealistic to expect any of this change for the better. But……. To often, I think much of the challenge we face is self inflicted. We tend to make things more complex or more difficult than they need […]
“Woe Are We,” And Other Hand Wringing Experiences
Every quarter there is the inevitable rush to close deals, to hit our numbers. Yet there are so many challenges and barriers. The global economy/turmoil and continued layoffs/reductions, and shuffling of priorities–both within our customers, markets, and within our own organizations. The simultaneous promise/threat of AI, “Will it help me be more efficient or will it make me unnecessary?” The increasing difficulty–perhaps–inability to engage our customers, with many claiming “outbound is dead,” and others seeing PLG and other inbound strategies as critical to making the numbers (forgetting PLG applies to only a small set of solutions). Add on to this […]
“Why I’m So Interested In Selling,” Shari Levitin
Preface: Shari Levitin is one of the most well know thought leaders and speakers in sales and marketing. Shari and I first met at a meeting of “sales thought leaders.” While all of us are fairly high energy people, Shari brought an energy level and passion beyond all of us–causing us to raise the level of our discussion. One can’t help getting energized, excited, and driven when Shari is part of the discussion. But there are a couple of things about Shari that are very special to me–her deep compassion, and she “gets” my weird sense of humor. There are […]
“Why I’m So Interested In Selling,” An Analysis
For the past month, I’ve been publishing stories on “Why I’m So Interested In Selling.” The group is fascinating–both in their stories and in their diversity. Some have had long careers in selling, some are relatively new. Some are or have been senior executives in very large companies, some are individual contributors. They come from all over the world, they represent B2B, technology , basic materials, SaaS, industrial products, professional services, B2B2C and B2C. So far, I have 51 stories (not all have been published yet). I will probably cap this at about 100 stories. But I wanted to do […]
“Why I’m So Interested In Selling,” Martin Mackay
Preface: I’ve been introduced to Martin Mackay through my friend Bob Apollo. As you will see, Martin has a fascinating and rich career an selling. Martin articulates something that I think so many of us find so exciting about selling: “The main reason is that it challenges you to reinvent yourself and stay current with your knowledge because it is the most dynamic industry of all. So it remains stimulating and exciting after many years. Within that, Sales is the most dynamic and challenging role and the combination is really without precedent.” Thanks for sharing your story Martin! How I […]
Shortcuts Are Seldom Short…..
We invest enormous amounts of energy seeking to avoid dong the work. We constantly seek shortcuts, things that enable us to avoid doing the work critical to creating and sustaining performance. Our mindsets aren’t so focused on improving efficiency, rather on avoiding doing the work. We scour social channels for shortcuts; what are the easiest ways to prospect, how can I send more emails/make more calls, how do I close more deals with less effort, how do I leverage tools like ChatGPT to do the work for me, and on and on……..? We constantly experiment with different shortcuts, trying to […]