Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Personalization Is, Well…….Personal…..
It’s year end, people are reaching out, through all channels, with connection requests, meeting requests to sell me something, everything you can imagine. And, as you might expect, everyone has “personalized” their outreach. Somehow, though it should be no surprise, they are remarkably impersonal. I’ve gotten used to ignoring those that are addressed to D.A. Brock, or refer to my company as Excellence or Excellenc.com. They clearly have no idea about me or the company, they have just harvested a list. There are those that say, “We’re in the same LinkedIn Group….” I spend no time in LinkedIn groups and […]
On Connections, Connecting, And Reconnecting ……
Yes, we’ve all come to despise connection requests. Our inboxes are filled with them, “I’m impressed by your profile….. We share common interests….. We’re in the same group….. We can get you leads….. I’d like to tell you about our products and how you can use them…. I worked for Estee Lauder and you’re cute (OK, we know about those)” Then there are those who wield their connections as weapons, alluding to “Mine is bigger than yours.” Some how the more connections they have, the more connected they think they are. Recently, I read a post recommending a number of […]
We Are Efficient, But Are We Effective?
Time is a problem. We never have enough. And regardless what we do, we never will. Whatever time we tend free up, is immediately filled with something else and we become time poor, once again. We have endless tools and technologies, increasingly assisted by AI, enabling us to accomplish more in each hour. The goal of each of these is increasing our efficiency. If I think, for example, the evolution of “prospecting letters.” I started in sales, about 5 years before emailing became popularized. To send a prospecting letter, I had to write it in longhand and give it to […]
Customers Need Help, But Do We Want To Be Helpful?
Just finished a fascinating discussion with my good friend, Charles Green, and my new friend, Miles Veth. As our conversations often go, we were talking about the state of selling and how we improve. The conversation got me thinking about the issue: “Our customers desperately need help, but do we want to be helpful, do we know how to be helpful? We, everyone, face worlds of accelerating turbulence, disruption, risk, and uncertainty. We face issues we may not have experienced before. We are, often, so busy we may not recognize threats or opportunities to change, improve grow. And when we […]
Our Unique Value Proposition
As sellers, we always talk about the importance of our “Unique Value Proposition.” For decades, we have thought about our value proposition in the context of our products/solutions. And we focused on our differentiation to determine our uniqueness. We would go through endless detail about the unique and differentiated capabilities of our products and solutions. We train our people, endlessly, about all the capabilities of our products and their superiority over the competition. “We have these features and functions, no other alternative has those….” Each of us would be presenting our unique list, thinking those would have an impact on […]
Are You Provoking The Right Questions?
We often gauge the quality of our conversations by the responses we get in those conversations. I have learned to gauge the quality of the conversation, the quality of engagement by the questions the people are asking. If there are no/few questions, there is very little engagement. If the majority of the questions are closed ended, the engagement isn’t much better. It’s the deep probing, deeper questions that tell me how engaged the people I’m talking to are (and how engaged I am.) How do we provoke this level of engagement? How do we engage people in ways that encourage […]