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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
“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 […]
🙍♂️🆚😵🔣🤔💭 (My Struggle With Emojis)
Preface: This post has no redeeming value other than some possible humor and letting off steam…… Increasingly, my social feeds 📱💬🌐 are posts filled with emojis. While I use the occasional 😂, 👍, 😄 emojis; I struggle with posts that are filled with these. Am I missing some sort of meaning or hidden implication 👀 🔥 💀 🙃? Our language 💬 continues to evolve, we adopt new jargon or buzzwords 🚀 🧠. We express them in new terms 💡 📊 🌱. We adopt new approaches, explaining things in shorthand ✂️ 📝 But I struggle to understand them 🤯. I worry […]
Why Can’t We Be Customer Focused?
This morning, I’ve been having a fascinating email conversation with my friend, Brian MacIver. If you don’t know/follow Brian, you should, he’s one of the best thinkers/practitioners I’ve met in selling. We were talking, loosely, around the advantages of being customer focused and what that means. He was sharing data that, frankly, wasn’t surprising, but it was stunning. His research showed those being customer focused outperformed those being more product focused by more than 2-1. It’s not surprising. For decades, we’ve seen data and research contrasting these approaches. The customer/problem focused sellers always out perform the product focused sellers—enormously! Yet, […]
“My Team Would Love To Learn More About Your Company…..”
The first sentence of the LinkedIn message was not dissimilar to the majority of emails and LI messages I get. David, my team and I would love to get the chance to learn more about your company. The author started with the concept she had been taught, “Make it about the customer, tell them how you want to learn more about them, their strategies, and challenges.” I write and advise clients about this, myself. Until we understand the customer and what they are trying to achieve, we don’t have a basis in engaging them in deeper conversations. Of course, this […]
Can You Answer This Question: “Tell Me More…”
I’ve noticed a huge gap in how we equip and train our sellers, how we help them engage our customers in high impact conversations that focus on them and their problems, not pitching our projects. This gap became bigger with Challenger, as we equipped our people to provide “Insights.” And more recently, with new customer research and AI tools, the gap has become even greater. We equip our people to provide a certain insight, for example, “We’ve noticed this to be an issue with similar customers, are you seeing the same thing?” Usually, we train them what response to expect, […]
“We’re So Vain, We Probably Think It About Us….”
One of my favorite songs, as a kid, was Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain….” It was not only a great song, but provoked decades of discussion about who she was singing about. Fast forwarding to current times, based on how we engage our customers, we demonstrate a similar vanity. We think our customer care about us–they obsess about our companies, our products, and how great we are. I can imagine an updated version of the song, “We’re so vain, we probably think the customers care about us…” At least, we conduct our engagement strategies based on our belief that customers […]