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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
Value Co-Creation Starts Internally
Recently, I wrote Moving From Value Creation To Value Co-Creation. Co-Creation is becoming an important concept, ultimately, being able to work with our customers, co-creating value will become very important–at least with our leading customers. We can’t possibly innovate fast enough to meet our customers needs to innovate and grow. Neither can our competitors. But if we can co-create with our customers, we can accelerate what we both achieve. We won’t co-create with every customer, we can’t possibly afford to, but it really isn’t necessary. Co-creating with customers who are innovators and thought leaders enables us to create unique value […]
The Right Stuff
The Right Stuff — a famous book by Tom Wolfe turned into a decent movie, was all about the very early stages of America’s space program. It’ a great book to re-read or read for the first time. Today’s organizations, we focus on lot’s of “stuff.” Do we have the right sales processes, do we have the right tools, to we have the right training, do we have the right programs, do we have the right metrics, do we have the right people, do we have the right insights? All this “stuff” helps make organizations and people more effective and […]
When Should Your Company Consider Global Expansion
I did a series of videos on Globalization for OpenView Labs. This is the first in the series. Globalization can be an important element of your growth strategies, but too often we it incorrectly or at the wrong time. Expanding into global markets isn’t just an issue of language, time zones, and distance. There’s a lot more to successfully grow in these new markets. This video will give you a starting point. To see the original at OpenView’s site, go to When Should Your Company Consider Global Expansion?
When We All Do The Same Thing, How Do We Stand Out?
I’m buying a new car—-no this article is not going to be about me whining about car sales people, it’s really about all of us in sales and marketing. I’ll re state the question: When we all do the same thing, how do we stand out? Let me give some context. I”ve leveraged two “car buying” services to help me find the best deal on cars. I knew pretty much what I wanted and was looking at three different kinds of cars. I used Costco’s program and the one offered by my insurance company to find dealerships and to get great […]
Are You Playing Your Game Or Someone Else’s?
Anyone who has been involved in competitive athletics at any level knows you have to play your own game. Once you start playing the opponents game, you probably lose. If by some strange chance you win, it’s after slogging it out for a very long time and it takes everything out of you. Likewise in sales, we maximize our ability to win–and bring great value to our customers by playing our own game. But there are huge numbers of things that threaten to throw us off our game. Sometimes, we get off our game, without even recognizing it until we […]
How Committed Are You?
With apologies to my Muslim, Jewish, Vegetarian, and Vegan friends, I’ll start this post with the old story: “In helping prepare the ham and egg breakfast, who was more involved, the chicken or the pig?” The response is, the chicken was involved, the pig was committed. I think this is an important distinction. We see too many people involved — being sincere, trying hard, smart, motivated, positive, very busy, but somehow something’s missing. Commitment, deep emotional commitment, seems to be one of the consistent differences between top performers and everyone else. This quality seems to be more about who we are, not […]