Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Do We Really Understand “As A Service?”
“As A Service,” particularly SaaS has become the “fashion” in business over the past decade. While everyone touts the subscription or term payment models as new and innovative, they have existed for decades, minimally. When I was selling mainframe computers (back around the time when the wheel was invented), I could only offer a subscription payment. Customer could choose to sign contracts for several years, but they couldn’t purchase them outright. Like today’s offerings, ongoing maintenance, service, support were built into the monthly pricing the customer paid. The customer could upgrade, and the monthly fee would be adjusted for that […]
Late To The Party……
It’s always a bummer to show up late to the party. The best drinks are gone, all that’s left is the cheap beer. One is left with picking a few crumbs of potato chips from the bottom a the bowl, all the good food has been eaten. And the most interesting people and most interesting conversation are all gone. The people that remain are exhausted, not interested in talking more, they just want to escape. Desperately, we try to find someone to talk to, something interesting to talk about, but…… It seems so much of “modern” selling looks like this. […]
“Why I’m So Interested In Selling,” Lori Richardson
Preface: Lori Richardson is one of the most passionate promoter of sales excellence, I’ve ever encountered. She’s a “4-time Salesforce Sales Influencer, teaches entrepreneurial sales at HBS, and runs Score More Sales. Among her most important work is promoting and mentoring Women In Sales. She is one of the co founders of Women Sales Pros, and an advisor to many other sales groups. Lori’s dedication to women and all sellers is a continued inspiration to me! Like many other contributors to the series, Lori didn’t start in selling, She found herself moving to sales to support her family. One of […]
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 […]