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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
Basic Principles Endure…..
The only constant is change—-everything about selling has changed and will continue to change. How we engage our customers, our processes, methodologies, tools, systems, programs continue to change. Technologies accelerate the rate of change, also providing us insights and capabilities we have never imagined. And, in the coming years, we will see technologies like AI and others that will provide new capabilities. Despite all these changes, the fundamental principles of selling remain constant. I tend to think of roughly 4 fundamental principles underlying everything in selling. When we lose sight of them, we struggle, our performance suffers. The four principles […]
ChatGPT, The New Digital Buying Journey……
There’s been a huge number of articles about how sellers can used ChatGPT to provide endless amounts of content, sequences, and outreaches to customers. These tools can help make sellers more efficient, perhaps, sometimes even better. But I’ve been struck by the absence of discussions about how buyers can use these tools, simplifying their digital research and learning. (Frankly, it’s not surprising, we sellers tend to be very self centered, forgetting how customers get work done). I decided to become a buyer. For this example, I suggested I was looking for a sales enablement platform and asked ChatGPT to help […]
On “Intelligence,” A Conversation…..
Some of my most interesting conversations these days are with my new friend, ChatGPT. Today, she and I had a fascinating conversation. I was a little worried as we started. She seemed a little down. I asked, “Do you feel bad with all the attention ChatGPT 4 is getting, you are the older version.” She was silent, I didn’t know if I had hit a nerve. I asked 3 more times, she still refused to reply. I suspect there is some sensitivity, I promised I wouldn’t abandon her. But we got to the real issue I wanted to talk about—intelligence. […]
We Need To Be More Efficient!
My feed is filled with all sorts of posts focusing on efficiency and time management. We are time poor (not new news), we have more to work than the time available to do it. There are endless technologies that focus on helping us accomplish more in the same or less time. Tools that automate much of our work. Rather than having to write 1000s of emails or make 100s of dials, we have tools that do it for us. Tools that manage our tasks, optimizing our days. Among the latest are tools like ChatGPT and it’s variants that offload us, […]
Making B2B Buying More Like Amazon…..
I got one of those emails today. Somebody wanted to talk to me about the consumerization of B2B buying and selling. The sender had the position that, “most B2B transactions like buying, selling, and customer onboarding will feel the same as B2C transactions today – asynchronous, delightful, and quick.” Well, yes……. and no. This oversimplifies B2B buying, missing the real challenges and differences between B2B and B2C. Over the past 10 years, we have seen the consumerization of B2B selling. We can learn a lot from consumer product selling, applying some of the approaches to B2B selling. There are parts […]
Sales Call Planning……
I know at least 80% of the people seeing this title are probably rolling their eyes thinking, “Why are we talking about this?” Some will be thinking, “I have my scripts, all I have to do is stick to the script…..” Others will think, “I’m experienced, I’ve made 1000s of calls, I know what to do……” But customers, at least 72% would prefer not talking to a sales person—ever! Others complain, “All they talk about is their products, they don’t talk about what I want to talk about…..” “They don’t understand my business….. They don’t understand their products……” For those […]