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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 Illusion Of A Shortcut
It seems to be human nature to constantly search for shortcuts–or hacks. I’m constantly looking for shortcuts. I explore, “How can I get this done in less time? How can I create this outcome with less work?” A favorite book from years ago was Tim Ferris, “The 4 Day Workweek,” was filled with ideas and shortcuts for all sorts of things. Our social feeds are filled with “experts” offering shortcuts, which we devour, often, implementing blindly. And, too often, these shortcuts fail. They may work for a short time, but they become less effective and we search for another shortcut. […]
ChatGPT As A Seller! See ChatGPT Pitch!
Warning: There is no redeeming value to this post. Call it Friday musing or Fun and Games with AI. It does provide a warning for many of us blindly jumping on the ChatGPT bandwagon, it does make many very obvious errors and struggles to understand them. I continue to discover new things to challenge ChatGPT with. I’m working on an interactive self study program for sellers to actually use ChatGPT in developing their own business acumen skills. My thinking is, rather than developing a conventional training program, I want to create a challenge for the participants. I will create a […]
Connections Or Connection?
Daily, I get connection requests from all sorts of people. There are those that promise to bring us 100s of qualified leads if we connect, then buy. There are those that say we have common businesses and interests, but nothing in their profile shows me where that commonality is–and they have never bothered to look at my profile. And there are a lot of genuine connection requests with intriguing people. With many pundits, “Connections” seem to be a bragging right, something akin to, “Mine is bigger than yours….” or “The more the merrier….” What seems to be missing in the […]
Settling….
I have to confess my lack of patience with an attitude I see permeating much of our world today. Recently, I find myself having more conversations with colleagues similarly impatient. We are disappointed, we struggle to understand what we see going on–particularly in much of business and selling. We wonder, “Do we have unrealistic expectations? Have things changed that substantially since we started (some, thought not all of us have been around the block more than a few times)? What’s happening, why? Ultimately, we get to the question, “Is that just the way things are…….” And we choose not to […]
Finding The Pain
For decades, sellers have been instructed to “find the pain!” We’ve been trained, almost like doctors, to diagnose our customers’ pains; “Does it hurt here? What about when I do this? How often do you experience it? Is it most severe after a poor earnings report? Once we and the customers have diagnosed the pain, we prescribe a solution. But there are real problems with this concept. The most superficial, is that we are looking for “pains” where our solution resolves their pain. Using the medical analogy, if I have a constant cough, is buying cough drops the right diagnosis, […]
Discovering And Qualifying Is Not Just For Sellers
Discovery and qualifying are critical to sellers. We use discovery to understand the customer’s needs, problems, requirements. We use discovery to understand the capabilities they seek in looking at solutions. We use discovery to understand their budgets, the alternatives they are considering, their knowledge of and interest in us, how they will make the decision, and when. Our focus on discovery is making an assessment, “Does the customer have needs and requirements that our products address, do we think we might have a strong possibility of competing and winning. Qualification enables us to understand that the customer is committed to […]