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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
Selling Possibility
My friend, Hank Barnes, is rethinking the buying process with a fascinating concept he calls The Advantage Factor. One of the things he discusses in the concept of “Selling Possibility.” It’s related to much of what I’ve written about Inciting Customers To Change. Too often, sellers catch customers who are very late in their buying cycle. They’ve determined there is a problem, an opportunity, a need to change. They’ve done all the heavy lifting of trying to figure out what questions they should be asking, who should be involved, the risks, the necessity of changing. They’ve done their homework, they […]
Do You Genuinely Care About…..”
Do you genuinely care about the people you are prospecting? Do you genuinely care about your customers? Do you genuinely care about your colleagues and peers? Do you genuinely care about your people? Do you genuinely care about what you are doing? I receive calls and outreaches from dozens of people a day. My inbox is filled, my social channels have dozens of, “Can we connect/meet” requests, my phone rings with calls from people/locations I’ve never heard of. And then, I get the sequences, “Dave, did you get my email/LinkedIn request?” “Dave we’ve phoned several times…” And, in all […]
Is It The Best Use Of Their Time?
When I started to write this post, I typed, “Is it a good use of their time?” Suddenly, I realized the mistake I was making. We are constantly making choices based on time. Often they are poor choices, though we usually don’t intend them to be so. Often unconscious, we just stop paying attention. But we attempt to make purposeful choices about how we invest our time This is what all the self-help books preach, and this is what we try to do to achieve our goals. In reality, we should only be making choices, “Is this the best use […]
Why Are We So Committed To Mediocrity?
Yeah, this is a rough way to start a blog post….. A tough accusation. Unfortunately, I think it’s well earned by too many. I don’t think we consciously commit to doing just good enough, I suspect it’s a gradual process that impacts so many of us. Some of it is understandable–though still not acceptable. Without a doubt, we face more turbulence, complexity, volatility, and uncertainty than we have ever experienced. It’s not just in our business lives, but permeates all parts of our lives. It’s exhausting! A coping mechanism may be to just get by, to just do enough. Pushing […]
Are You Distinctive?
I’ve been reading some fascinating work on marketing, brand building, differentiation (Imagine ever learning something from marketers 😉 ) I listened to a fascinating webcast by Mark Ritson about Differentiation, take some time to listen to it. It prompted me to think a little about differentiation and much more about distinctiveness. First, a few quick thoughts about differentiation. We tend to misunderstand and misuse differentiation. We look at how we (our companies/ourproducts) are different from the alternatives. We have endless feature/function comparisons, trying to demonstrate our offerings are different from the competition. Or we compare our customers, “we have these […]
Human Interaction Is Not Designed For Efficiency
As sellers, we are obsessed with efficiency. It’s no surprise, we have more demands on our time than we have time to fulfill those demands. We constantly seek better ways to accomplish more. For decades, technology continues to offer ways to improve our efficiency (and every once in a while, our effectiveness–but that’s a separate post). In addition to technology, we revise and redesign our processes to make us more efficient. Role specialization helps us more efficiently manage our relationships with customers. We have SDRs/BDRs focused on prospecting. AEs manage qualified deals, Customer Service manages the relationships after we have […]