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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
We Talk About Problems Differently Than Our Customers Talk About Them
I had a fascinating conversation today. It was with an entrepreneur doing fascinating things in leveraging AI, data, analytics to help his customers. He had a number customers, including some thought leaders and opinion shapers in his markets. As we were discussing the problem he solved, he spoke in terms of data quality, currency, data analytics, reporting. It was clear that what he did had a very high impact on his customers. As we spoke, I asked, “Is the way your customers talk about the problem the same way you talk about it? Do they describe it in terms of […]
It’s Not Your Job To Solve The Problems!
I grew in my career establishing myself as a “Problem Solver.” Finding and fixing problems was like a scientific challenge, which matched my training as a theoretical physicist. I proactively sought problems and challenges and worked to solve them. At first it was as a seller working with my customers. I’d wander the halls of Citicorp and Chase Manhattan bank, talking to people, looking for problems. A better way to do credit card approvals and processing, a better way to do wire transfers and foreign exchange. I made my quotas by finding problems and presenting solutions to my customers Then […]
A Seller’s Dream, “Customers Don’t Want To See Sellers!”
We’ve all seen the data. Customer would prefer a rep-free buying experience! And when they do have to involve sellers, they want to minimize seller engagement, often not engaging sellers until the final 20% of their buying process. While there as been a certain amount of hand wringing and “how to we fix this” in the selling community, and with me and many of my peers, I can imagine the majority of sellers quietly cheering!!! “This is fantastic! It makes our jobs so much easier, the customer does most of the hard work! All we have to do is focus […]
Until People Are Interested In The Questions, The Answers Are Irrelevant
Charlie Green and I had a fascinating conversation about a person he’s coaching. This individual is truly one of the world’s top performers in his area of expertise. He has years of experience, more data than ChatGPT would know how to deal with and more experience in solving these very difficult problems than 90% of the business world. Yet he’s struggling to get the attention he deserves to get. As we talked, Charlie and I both recognized, he’s giving people the answers they need, but they haven’t yet asked the questions indicating they need the answers. This pretty much summarizes […]
“Activities Don’t Drive Strategy!”
Brandon Fluharty made a brilliant observation: Activities Don’t Drive Strategy! While no leader sets out to have activities drive strategy (at least I hope they don’t), too often we get distracted and activities take center stage. Stated differently, we stop seeing the forest and focus on the trees. Activities are the things we do to execute our strategies. Our strategies define our overall goals, our target markets, how we create value with the customers, how we differentiate our offerings, what we are trying to achieve with our customers and for our organization. Activities are the things we do to execute […]
Loss Aversion…..
None of us like to lose! As sellers, we expect tough competition and challenges, but we are driven to win. There’s a sense of well deserved pride to see a customer select us as the best of all the alternatives. While a nuanced idea, sometimes, we may be less focused on winning, more focused on not losing. It seems our aversion to losing is, often, higher than our desire to win. Sometimes this loss aversion is manifested by sellers not chasing the tough but winnable deals. Sometimes, we see exactly the opposite, we see sellers chasing deals that aren’t winnable. […]