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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
Freeing Up Time
The hot area of focus for many of the new AI based tools is how it frees up seller time. We can get these tools to write our emails, to help write proposals, to do the research and prep for meetings, to eliminate many of the administrative tasks, CRM updating and all sorts of things that take seller time. The promise of these tools in freeing up seller time is stunning. But something is missing from the conversation. Once we free up the time, how should sellers be using it? What should they be doing? And, more importantly, Are they […]
Relationship Selling
Relationships are important in selling, in business, and life. But what does that mean, at least for selling? The old stereotypes and some that were prevalent when I started selling include that backslapping sales person, with the latest jokes, who focused on becoming a “buddy.” They were the one’s that not only sent their customers birthday cards or took them out for drinks, but they also sent their customers’ kids birthday cards. The mantra of these sellers was, “When the going gets tough, the tough take their customers to lunch!” …and there are too many sellers still using this as […]
The New Secret To Selling Success!!
We are driven to find the single magical secret to selling success. That one thing, if we do it well, everything else magically falls into place and all our problems go away. If we find and do that one thing, our worries about hitting our goals, maxing our comp plans, achieving our scaling plans, max’ing our market caps all disappear. There have been past secrets to sales success. Years ago, it was the number of dials/calls we made each day. Then it was taken over by the number of emails a day. If we produced X emails a day, we […]
30 Seconds….
I’ve got you for no more than 30 seconds! That’s the data for our attention span for screen time. For blog posts, I have to reduce my verbosity to 400-600 words and give you two images to allow your brains to “rest” to process the information I have shared. It’s stunning how our abilities to pay attention are plummeting! We are surrounded by too many things whose primary purpose is to distract us! In a world of constant distraction, how do we learn to focus and pay attention? As we work with others, how do we focus our collective attentions? […]
Talking With ChatGPT Mirrors Our Human Conversations
Have you ever noticed how the way we work with ChatGPT and other LLMs tends to mirror so many of our customer and internal conversations? Too often, it might be similar to talking with a very knowledgeable person who is unengaged, uncaring, aloof. The typical conversation with a LLM is very one sided. It’s not very interested in us, it seems to be in a rush, as if it has someone or something more important to work with. While it doesn’t ignore us, like so many customers or others do, it answers so directly it seems impatient. And it […]
What Is Your Willingness To Be Uncomfortable?
We live in a world of “discomfort.” And our natural tendencies are to actively avoid or escape discomfort or uncomfortable situations. Our discomfort tends to arise when things aren’t happening the way we expected them to happen. We expect a certain response or reaction in a conversation, and we get something entirely different from what we may have wanted or hoped for. We are doing our work but things aren’t working. We are focused on achieving our goals, yet we are not achieving them. We aren’t getting the “support” we had hoped to get. Or we may be doing everything […]