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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
“Foreign Language” Training Must Be Mandatory For Sellers!!
A lot of you might be scratching your heads, “What is Dave talking about, all our customers speak Mandarin, or English, or Spanish, or Japanese, or Australian (Yeah, I still struggle with Australian)?” I struggle with French and German, usually beginning conversations with “Parlez vous Anglais?” “Sprichst du Englisch?” I’m relieved when they say “Yes…” When we speak a common language, we are able to connect and communicate effectively with each other. And when we don’t….. Despite my struggles with speaking different languages, I think Foreign Language Training must be mandatory for every seller. CROs must start charging their Sales […]
Reimagining The “Corporate Deck”
We’ve all done it—we’ve victimized our prospects and customers with the “Corporate Deck.” And we’ve be been victims of sellers pitching us their versions of the deck. We know how these “glamor” pieces work. They are all about corporate vanity and follow almost the same format: The first few slides tell the customer who we are and how great we are. They show things like how many people work in the company, how many countries we we are in, how great our financial performance has been, our market cap and claims of being a unicorn. Lots of facts, figures, charts. […]
Becoming The “Topic Authority”
Most of our marketing and selling efforts focus on becoming the “product/solution authority.” “We have the leading CRM solution on the market…… Our manufacturing technologies are the best solutions available….. We are the leading provider of financial services solutions…..” Our content and our selling efforts focus on demonstrating the superiority of our solutions. “We have the best references, we have more features/functions, we are cheaper….” When our customers and prospects have reached the point in their buying process focusing on solution selection, this may be important. But what about Topic Authority? Where to our prospects and customers get information on […]
BHAGs And Radical Simplification
BHAGs are “Big Hairy Audacious Goals.” The term was, apparently, developed by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. I first became familiar with it from TJ Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor. What I find fascinating about BHAGs is to achieve them, you are forced to rethink everything you do. Doing more of what you currently do, or even doing better at what you currently do is, usually, insufficient. Generally, you have to reinvent everything you do to achieve them. I decided to do a thought experiment, establishing a BHAG, asking each of you to reflect on what you would do. By […]
Reflections And An Apology
Recently, a very close friend referred to me as “David Downer,” referring to the SNL character Debbie Downer. While I suspect the comment was largely made in jest, with every joke there is a certain element of truth. It caused me to reflect, am I being too negative? I’m often very critical of how we, sellers and leaders, behave. Recently, I wrote a scathing post on leadership and layoffs. I called out management failure. Often, I’m very hard on our endless fascination with miracle cures, wishful thinking, and new tricks. In many of my private conversations, and perhaps some public, […]
My Fight With ChatGPT, Coaching ChatGPT
I’m finding great ways to use ChatGPT and am using it as a debate partner to better understand critical issues and to test my own thinking. Yesterday, however, we struggled with each other. I sought to get it’s perspective on a certain issue and it’s thinking was flawed. At that point I started trying to coach ChatGPT. It reminded me of so many coaching sessions I’ve had with human beings. I started asking the question, “What are the top 15 metrics CROs should be tracking?” It returned a reasonable answer, including revenue growth, pipeline value, conversion rates, CAC/CLD and other […]