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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
The Power Of “Ad Hoc” Coaching
As leaders, we know our job is to maximize the performance of our people. We know that coaching is one of the highest leverage methods of maximizing their performance. We know we should schedule reviews with our people, integrating coaching into those reviews. Whether it’s a deal review, account review, pipeline, prospecting forecast, territory, or a one on one, we get great power integrating coaching into each of these. As much as we know the importance of this, as much as we may want to coach our people in these meetings, reality smacks us in the face. We don’t have […]
Is Selling Dead Or Dying?
It’s interesting to see continued predictions of the death of selling. There are all sorts of variations. Some focus on PLG types of approaches, where the product sells itself–at least until one wants to scale that to the enterprise level. Others see the preference of buyers for rep-free buying experiences and digital buying processes as evidence that selling is no longer necessary. It’s interesting, all of the articles I read about the death of selling comes from sellers, or “experts” on selling. I tend to read widely, one of the areas I study is the future of procurement. I never […]
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 […]