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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
Bench Strength!
Reading an “obscure article,” I was reminded of an important leadership principle. It’s something I’ve not seen anywhere in discussions of leadership, GTM, or building business. It’s the concept of building Bench Strength. Building bench strength focuses not only on the current performance of people in the organization, but it focuses on developing their capabilities for the future. It focuses on developing people’s abilities to step into new roles and make greater contributions to the organization. We know the importance of bench strength in sports teams. Back-filling an injured player, bringing in someone with deep skills for the situation, minimizing […]
Conversations……
Let’s step out of our selling roles for a moment and talk about conversations. Think about the conversations you have within your own organizations. Think about the conversations you have with colleagues and partners. In reflecting on those conversations, what are the characteristics of the most impactful conversations and meetings? Think, also, of the meetings that were a massive waste of time. What are the characteristics of those meetings? (Unfortunately, we seem to spend too much time in those.) Let’s look at the most impactful conversations and meetings. Whether one on one or group discussions, the best have many of […]
Can You Hold Up Your Side Of The Conversation?
We have tools and technology that “equip” us for conversations with our customers. In years past, it might have taken hours to put that together, preparing for a single call. Now, all of it is at our fingertips. The problem is, these are the starting points to a conversation. And if they work, as we would hope they work, can we carry on the conversation? Too often, the conversations go like this, “I’ve noticed market expansion is a key strategy of your company. We help our customers expand their markets with these solutions, can I schedule a demo?” Or, “You […]
“Did You Get My Last Email…….”
Our inboxes, social feeds, text messages, voicemail (does anyone use it anymore), are filled with outreaches. If your experience is anything like mine, 99.9% are a pure waste. Poorly targeted, personalized in the most impersonal manner, AI authored. The volume grows. Fortunately I’ve trained my spam filters to take out a lot, but inevitably a few sneak through. But this post isn’t whining about those initial emails that we get. There are also a very small number of very good and relevant outreaches that suffer from the same problem. It’s the “Did you get my last email” problem. We know […]
On Differentiation
Differentiation is critical in buying/selling. Differentiation gives buyers choices and helps them choose. We invest in never ending differentiation battles: “My product is better than the others, we have more features and functions, we have a more impressive customer base, we have great references, we have high NPS scores, we are cheaper……” Our websites are filled with comparative charts, listing features/functions, capabilities compared with the alternatives. And we ensure we always have more “check” marks in our columns than the alternatives. And our competitors have their versions of those charts. We spend so much time focusing on how different we […]
Preoccupation/Self-Absorption
We are constantly preoccupied. We have “to-do” lists filling our heads. We endless tasks and project that have to get done. Others have expectations on us. Whether it’s our managers, people we work with, customers, our families. Sometimes, we create it ourselves. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been so preoccupied with something that I’ve lost track of time, I’ve been late to meetings, I’ve missed other things that are important. Sometimes, we are preoccupied with distractions. We find ourselves doom scrolling through our devices. We don’t want to miss anything causing us to be distracted by […]