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Making A Difference β Thoughts, Observations and Opinions
This is Dave Brockβs Blog.
It offers my views on a variety of business, sales, marketing, and leadership topic.Β My goal is to make a difference for you, the reader, in both your professional and personal lives.
Latest Posts
The “Recipe” Is Just The Starting Point…..
Recently, just to try something different, I signed up for a cooking class. The family is getting together for the Holidays, I knew we would be spending a lot of time cooking. Usually, my task is to supply the wine and wash the dishes. I wanted to contribute to preparing the meal, so I decided to take a cooking class. There was a group of about 10 of us, with varying degrees of experience. We were in a professional kitchen, with two professional chefs as instructors. Our mission was to prepare a couple of appetizers and an entree. We had […]
Cliff Notes And AI…….
Too often, when going to college, I discovered that studying, reading books, and writing thoughtful analysis really interfered with my education. It cut into my time socializing, drinking beer, partying and sports. I wasn’t the only one, it seemed all my friends suffered with the same problem. College would have been fantastic if it weren’t for all those books and reports we had to write. As creative people, we looked at how we could get even the minimal amount of studying done, with much less work. We discovered the secret to our success, Cliff Notes. Rather thank struggling through 336 […]
Adaptive Fluency
Tamara Schenk and I have monthly conversations on all sorts of things. Today, while our agenda didn’t start with this, it ended up being the focus of our conversation. It’s the importance of “Adaptive Fluency.” To use street venacular, it’s rolling with the punches, yet still achieving your goals. Sadly, so much of the direction we seem to be going, in sales, marketing, leadership, seems to be taking us away from being adaptively fluent. We are so committed to “scripting” all of our interactions with others. While we have tools and AI to help us refine the scripting, better targeting […]
“Information, Information Everywhere, But Not A Bit To ………”
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has a famous line, “Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink….” There’s another saying, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink….” I’m reminded of variants of these sayings as I see the glut of tools/techniques leveraging the latest generation of AI and generative language tools. All provide us more information, “insight,” and capability with which to engage our customers. Top performers are already using these tools with tremendous advantage, and they always have because that’s what top performers have always done. I suspect, what we will […]
πββοΈππ΅π£π€π (My Struggle With Emojis)
Preface: This post has no redeeming value other than some possible humor and letting off steam…… Increasingly, my social feeds π±π¬π are posts filled with emojis. While I use the occasional π, π, π emojis; I struggle with posts that are filled with these. Am I missing some sort of meaning or hidden implication π π₯ π π? Our language π¬ continues to evolve, we adopt new jargon or buzzwords π π§ . We express them in new terms π‘ π π±. We adopt new approaches, explaining things in shorthand βοΈ π But I struggle to understand them π€―. I worry […]
Why Can’t We Be Customer Focused?
This morning, I’ve been having a fascinating email conversation with my friend, Brian MacIver. If you don’t know/follow Brian, you should, he’s one of the best thinkers/practitioners I’ve met in selling. We were talking, loosely, around the advantages of being customer focused and what that means. He was sharing data that, frankly, wasn’t surprising, but it was stunning. His research showed those being customer focused outperformed those being more product focused by more than 2-1. It’s not surprising. For decades, we’ve seen data and research contrasting these approaches. The customer/problem focused sellers always out perform the product focused sellers—enormously! Yet, […]