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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
Prisoners Of Our Own Experience
There was a great article in the New York Times on December 30, Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike. It suggests “as our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off.” While the article focuses on innovation and creativity, we encounter the same issue in our work with clients every day. We all become prisoners of our own experience. By that, the solutions that people look for tend to be the same old solutions that have been used over and over. Organizations and people tend to define their strategies, processes, and approaches to business, based […]
Less Talk And A Little More Conversation
Yesterday I was watching CBS Sunday Morning. One of the segments was on conversation – something this world of technology has helped us lose. Sure there is a lot of “talk” – emails, SMS’s, blogs, countless mobile calls, social networking tools. Words flow between all of us, but are we really communicating — are we having conversations — something where we are engaged, listening, actively participating with someone else? Having a conversation — authentic communication requires a lot of each party. Each person has to commit themselves to the other, at least for a few moments in time. A conversation […]
Being A Good Customer
As a sales professional — sometimes frustrated with certain customers, sometimes I feel like saying: “I’m doing the best I can in selling to you—you need to start being a good customer!!” Actually, that statement is not as arrogant as it sounds. Professional sales people seek to create meaningful value for their customers. They want to establish relationships–partnerships with customers. In today’s tough procurement environment, sometimes customers do themselves a disservice by putting barriers in place so these true value based relationships can be established. I just saw a John Quelch’s blog on Harvard Business Review Online: How To Be […]
"Listening Labs" – Unpacking Core Drivers and Barriers
I’m a terrific fan of Fred Reicheld’s book, The Ultimate Question, and the Net Promoter approach. Paul Marsden of Satmetrix just put a terrific post in his blog on these topics on using Listening Labs to understand the customer experience and understand core drivers underlying why customers buy (or don’t buy). It’s a great post and I consider it must reading for anyone seeking to enhance the value of their offerings to their current and potential customers. Follow the link: “Listening Labs”- Unpacking Core Drivers and Barriers.
One Way Networking–Is This What Networking Is About?
I just read in interesting article in the Wall Street Journal: How To Network Without Sabotaging Your Own Job Hunt. It discusses a number of issues very appropriate to effective networking. There are many people in my close networks who see value in staying connected. We talk or email each other, we exchange ideas, we continue to look for things of interest to each other. These are effective relationships that I value and invest in. There are those other people “in my network.” These are people who I may have tried to build a relationship with, who for various reasons […]
It’s the Message, Not Messaging
We’re all inundated with emails, messages, and other forms of communication. To be fair, we probably do that with our own communications to others. In working with many organizations, I have found email and messaging taking over from face to face and voice communications. The quality of communication has declined and many organizations are facing “death by Blackberry.” I’ve been curious to read about the emerging backlash—“email free Friday’s” (we know what happened with casual Fridays.). I just ran across a great post by Leo Babauta in WebWorker Daily. “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from […]