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
What We Miss About Value
The majority of sellers don’t understand value. As a result, the only thing they talk about is the product–it’s features and functions, customers using the solutions, how great their company is, and how the product is better than competition. They don’t understand the customer, as a result, can’t translate what the solutions mean to the customer. Perhaps, they’ve been trained generally, so they understand the solution might improve productivity, reduce costs, improves quality, or help drive revenue. They quote results from other customers and cite generalities about the results those customers have achieved. But they can’t translate it to specific […]
The Problem With Algorithms
Our lives seem dominated by algorithms. Sign onto Amazon or any other shopping site, and we are pummeled with recommendations, all based on what we’ve bought and recent searches we may have made. Many of our news feeds present content based on that which we have read and consumed in the past. Facebook, LinkedIn and other social channels are (in)famous for feeding us content based both on our interaction with the content and their insight into activity on other sites. All of this is targeted at maximizing our time on these sites (and our spending) based on the predictions on […]
We Make Selling Far More Difficult Than Necessary!
Confession time. I’m terribly lazy. I want to accomplish a lot, but I want to do it with minimal effort. As I look at selling, today, it requires far too much effort—far more than I’m willing to do. After all, we have to send 1000s of emails a day, we have to make 100s of calls, we have to spend hours doing outreach in LinkedIn and other channels. It’s harder and harder to get a response. 5 years ago, it took 200-400 touches to get a response. Today, it’s 1000-1500! Who knows what it will be next year! And when […]
Scaling “Sameness….”
Differentiation is critical. We know it. We invest a lot of time and effort in differentiating our products and services from the alternatives. We do endless feature-function comparisons. We carefully construct comparative checklists, identifying the capabilities that set us apart from other offerings—always making sure we check more boxes for our offerings than the competition checks off. And our competitors construct their version of the same comparative checklists, featuring more checks in their boxes of features-functions. When we meet with customers we focus on the differentiation of our offerings in those conversations. We talk about the results our customers get, […]
The Gift Of Uncertainty
It’s human nature to be uncomfortable with uncertainty. We are driven to have answers, to seek solutions. We, often, display avoidance behaviors–persisting in doing things the way we have always done them, even when we know they are no longer effective. We choose to do nothing primarily because we don’t want to face uncertainty. When we are uncertain, we tend to embrace those who appear to be certain. We respect those that appear to have the answers. To a degree, certainty gives us the feeling of power and control. And we accept them, even if they are wrong, but they […]
Humans Emulating AI/Robots…..
There’s a lot of concern, wherever one turns, about AI and Robots becoming more “human.” Usually, it’s stories of AI or robots taking on human characteristics, mostly the bad characteristics. We reflect back on movies like “Terminator,” worrying about AI and robots taking over the world. Daily, we see examples of various forms of AI based plagiarism, some unintended, some malicious and intentional. It’s increasingly difficult to discern what’s real and what’s fake. But a reverse problem has been accelerating. It’s human beings emulating AI and Robots. Meaning, context, connecting, caring, empathy, being “in the moment,” are all attributes that […]