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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 Is About Helping People….
In recent conversations with friends like Brent Adamson, Charlie Green, Mark Modesti, Alice Heiman, and others a common theme keeps surfacing: “Selling is about helping people….” Over the past years, too many seem to have forgotten this. Or people new to selling have never learned this. The focus is about our own success, our objectives. The customer becomes the object, perhaps obstacle to our success. We’ve redesigned our engagement processes to minimize the human connection. We design our engagement processes, optimizing for efficiency, outsourcing a much of the process as possible to AI. We avoid any human interaction unless it’s […]
Are You Leading By Example?
Growing up, my father was a terrific coach and mentor. But I suspect I was a difficult student. Every once in a while, I would catch him doing things differently than he had suggested. I’d often say, “Dad, you want me to do these things, but I see you doing exactly the opposite…..” He always laughed in frustration, replying, “Do as I say, not as I do!!!” These were always more humorous exchanges, but Dad actually took my questions seriously. He would often say, “You are right, I need to practice what I preach.” Sometimes he would explain why he […]
Running In Circles…..
We engineer our selling processes, creating strict stages, critical activities in each stage, perhaps stage exit criteria. We believe that if we stick an opportunity in one side of the process, run it down our sales assembly line, there is a high probability we will exit with a Purchase Order in hand. At least that’s the theory….perhaps the dream. We design our organizations, playbooks, scripts, and metrics based on this linear process. Marketing hands us MQLs, SDRs convert them to SQLs, setting up the next meeting and the opportunity/customer is passed to the next step in this linear process. It […]
The Hours You Work Are Irrelevant!
Every week, my newsfeeds are filled with executives pounding their chests about hours worked. Elon Musk is famous for his “80 hour” work week demands. Scott Wu of Cognition has said, “We don’t believe in work-life balance — building the future of software engineering is a mission we all care so deeply about that we couldn’t possibly separate the two,” also demanding 60-80 hour, 6 days/week work ethic. AT&T CEO, John Stankey has written to his employees, “If a self-directed, virtual, or hybrid work schedule is essential for you to manage your career aspirations and life challenges, you will have […]
“Let’s Talk About Me……”
It’s human nature to be self interested. We focus on “our success, our priorities,” and “What happens if I make a mistake?” This operates at personal and organizational levels, “How does our company hit its goals?” We talk to our customers, about their challenges and problems, but always shape those conversations to lead to a discussion about our products. Discovery becomes a focus on their need for what we sell. Customer experience is “how do you like our product,” not “are you achieving your goals.” Retention focuses on, “Please keep using our product, do you want to buy more seats?” […]
“A PhD In Your Pocket Is Worthless Without This…”
“Like having a team of PhD level experts in your pocket,” is attributed to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The problem is, just because we have access to this level of knowledge doesn’t mean we know how to use it. It doesn’t mean we know how to test it for reasonability or possible hallucinations. This is nothing new. How many GTM professionals read Harvard Business Review, think about the content, and adapt it to what they are trying to do? How many professionals regularly consult sources like Google Scholar, the Library of Congress, ProQuest, ResearchGate, and others? All of these resources […]