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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
Surrendering To AI…..
Every day, we see exciting new applications of AI. We all know the power of AI in helping take over administrative tasks, helping research customers, prospects, taking the tedium out of developing content or drafting emails. These tasks, which take so much of our time, and that, often, do poorly can now be done by AI. And we see daily announcements of new capabilities and uses of AI. Recently, there’s been some excitement about AI tools monitoring our desktops and devices. Based on what it detects us doing, it organizes potential next tasks. It may see that I’m writing a […]
“The Illusion Of Service”
I was at one of my favorite restaurants. I’ve become somewhat of a regular, they seated me at my normal table, my favorite server was waiting on me. But something was really off that evening. The restaurant wasn’t that full, the wait staff were busy, but service was really slow. My server is normally on top of things, but she was struggling. When she brought my glass of wine, she apologized. “Dave, I’m so sorry, things are screwed up today, unfortunately, we are ‘Giving the Illusion of Service….’” It struck me, that’s what so many are giving these days. They […]
“We Don’t Finish Enough Things……”
Growing up, my parents constantly reminded me to finish things, “Eat everything on your plate…….. Make sure you finish your homework….. You haven’t finished putting things away…..” That bad habit has persisted for decades. I look at the books piled on my desk, over a dozen–half finished. Two books I’m writing, almost finished. Any number of little projects around the house, all in the same state, for weeks, not quite done. I intended—still intend do—complete all those things. But something always diverts me, a new idea, a new project, some cool thing…. Or the work I know I have to […]
Seek First To Understand…..
The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People was originally published on August 15, 1989. Habit 5 starts with, “Seek first to understand……” It’s foundational to everything we do, whether in our business, community, or personal relationships. Yet it seems to be one of the most difficult habits to live by. And it is one of the most important habits for us to exercise in learning, growing, and achieving our objectives. Despite how well intended we are, too often, we make assumptions or leap to conclusions, without first understanding. We may have a well defined ICP, we know the key issues […]
Forcing Customers To Buy The Way We Want To Sell!
There’s a fascinating article in HBR this month, A Better Way To Link Sales And Marketing. There’s a lot “right” about this article. It offers very good insights about how we engage our customers very effectively, consistently, and efficiently. It talks about how we integrate our communications strategies effectively across all parts of the organization–marketing, sales, service, and so forth. It talks about how we can manage our interactions to focus on the concerns customers express in their buying effort. The concept is what they call, the Digital Customer Hub (DCH). It’s not a new concept, Digital Buying Rooms have […]
Our Customers Don’t Care About How We Want To Sell To Them!
We engage in endless debates/discussions about our GTM strategies and how we want to sell to our customers. We argue about approaches, methodologies. We endlessly debate things like PLG, land/expand, should we use SDRs/BDRs, the roles of AEs/AMs, technologies to extend our outreach and improve our productivity, the use of AI agents, channel/partner strategies, how we grow/expand/upsell/cross sell. We spend endless time discussing precise mathematical models, looking at bow ties, discussing metrics focused on our selling activities. We invest 10’s of millions, theoretically to improve productivity and performance. And when these don’t produce what we want, we double down, doing […]