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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
Stop Selling Solutions, Start Framing Problems
We have an enormous disconnect with our customers. We focus on selling a solution. Our customers struggle with understanding the problem. We’ve tended to take an approach of “Find a problem, Solve it!” We narrow our ICPs to customers that are likely to have the problems we solve. We look for signals those customers might have the problem we solve. Perhaps they are hitting on the website, perhaps they downloaded a white paper or case study. We immediately leap in, “We have a solution to your problem, can I schedule a demo?” Alternatively, we are on a discovery call, asking […]
“AI Is Taking Your Job!!” Ho-Hum, Yawn…..
Throughout my feeds I see the alarm bells, “AI is coming for your job!” We see virtually every marketing and sales role threatened by AI (though some of the research doesn’t show this). There are thoughtful articles in major newspapers about the impact of AI on jobs and work. In the past week, we’ve seen alarming reports about unemployment caused by AI. Fewer entry level jobs, even the CEO of Anthropic said, “AI could be coming after my job.” I think what we are missing is not that the job market is vanishing, being displaced by agents and robots. Instead, […]
What Happened To “Voice Of The Customer?”
In the 80’s/90’s, one of the most important initiatives organizations had was something called, “Voice Of The Customer.” These initiatives were very powerful and impacted the whole organization. It was a very powerful discovery methodology to unlock customer insight, opinions, views. VOC, as it was known at the time, impacted everyone in the organization. Gaining deep understanding of the VOC and their experience with our offering, shaped our GTM and customer service/experience strategies. They shaped our product development strategies. They shaped our business strategies. They helped us understand a number of things. How our customers actually used our products. I […]
Freedom Of Speech/Fear Of Speaking
Yes, this is one of those “political” posts–at least for those who choose to look at this concept as politics. If you do, probably should stop reading right now. But I cannot remain quiet. As I continue to read the news, pulling together what may seem like disparate threads, I see a disturbing strategy being implemented by the current administration. And, terrifyingly, I see too much acquiescence and too little fight. Each threat taken on it’s own may seem small, but as we aggregate them the results are devastating. What has made this country great has been the willingness to […]
Moving Beyond Customer Experience, What About “Customer Entanglement?”
It’s thought experiment time again. We have moved beyond customer satisfaction, now focusing on customer experience. Likewise, we have moved beyond value propositions, to value creation (including sensemaking, customer confidence). For both of these, what comes next? I don’t mean fancy terminology some agency might put together that’s more hip, rad, sexy, cool–but is a relabeling of what we already are doing. I’m talking about an entirely different engagement process. A way of working with our customers, of engaging them deeply through the lifecycle of the relationship. I’m thinking of the idea of “Customer Entanglement.” What does it mean to […]
What If We Started Thinking About Durable Revenue and Revenue Quality?
We’ve been trained to worship the recurring revenue model. It’s the star metric in every SaaS pitch deck, with ARR growth as the bedrock of business models. It dominates our feeds, the press and much of our thinking in business. Unicorns have been built on this recurring revenue model. But lately, that model has been shaky. And, I have to confess, I’ve always been a little confused. What about the revenue and growth models of all the other businesses outside SaaS? How could they have possibly been successful without the recurring revenue models? What is different about them? Afterall, SaaS […]