Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
“Just The Facts, Ma’am…”
If you search the streaming services, you can find a classic 1950’s Police TV Series entitled “Dragnet.” It was a big show in the 1950s, the leading protagonist was Sergeant Joe Friday, played by Jack Webb. Sergeant Joe Friday was a very straight laced detective famous for his investigative technique. In virtually every episode, he drove witness recollections with the phrase, “Just the fact, Ma’am.” Sergeant Friday wasn’t interested in any of the peripheral issues in investigating crimes. He didn’t care about how people felt, what they experienced. He just wanted the information and data, devoid of everything else. Yet […]
What About The “Human” Element In Selling?
As my social feeds get filled with “gurus” talking about how AI can be deployed to do virtually everything critical to sellers, I started wondering about the “Human” element of engaging our customers and people in our own organizations. It seems AI and tools like ChatGPT are the answer for virtually every sales activity. It can generate endless amounts of well written content for email campaigns, blogs, and so forth. Despite the fact that it’s data bases haven’t been updated since 2021, there are those that say it is very powerful for research on our customers and their issues. And […]
Tracing Our Problems Back To The HP-35 Scientific Calculator
I’ve come to a, perhaps rash, conclusion. The majority of challenges we face in business–at least selling–can be traced back to the HP-35 handheld scientific calculator. No it wasn’t learning Reverse Polish Notation–though I did struggle with that for a few days. Prior to the introduction of the HP-35, I had to understand arithmetic. I learned how to add/subract, multiply/divide. I learned the structure of mathematics, and how to use mathematics and arithmetic formulas to get answers. I understood how those answers were derived, the reasoning logic underlying those numbers. Of course, as I did long division or complex multiplication, […]
Rushing To Solutions…..
Sellers try to generate interest in every outreach, “People like you have these challenges…… We can solve your problems…” Our “discovery” is focused on, “Do you have this issue…..We have a solution!” Everything we do is focused on getting to the demo, getting to the pitch, getting to the proposal as quickly as possible. It seems to be human nature to rush to solutions. In some sense, we can understand this. Sellers are trained to talk about their products and solutions. In some sense, buyers might be prone to leap to solutions. They have a problem, they want to solve […]
Freeing Time For The “Human Touch” In Selling
We revel in leveraging our technologies for buyer engagement–and, apparently, buyers revel in these as well. Buyers are spending less time with sellers–partly because it’s more effective for them. And if we are being honest with ourselves, too often we drive them away. I think, however, we misunderstand digital engagement, leveraging AI, and the automation of the buying/selling process. There are some transactional buying processes that should be fully automated. This is not a surprise, we’ve seen this in consumer buying and many types of B2B buying for decades (How long has EDI existed?) For those buying processes where there […]
On Layoffs…..
I read an important article by Elizabeth Spiers, Layoffs by Email Show What Employers Really Think of Their Workers. Please take the time to read it, it’s more important than this post. In the past year, we’ve seen 100’s of thousands of layoffs, particularly in technology segments. As Ms. Spiers outlines, as tragic as these are, the dehumanizing means by which too many of those people have been notified of their terminations tells us more about the absence of caring and respect senior leaders have of their people. For years, I’ve been writing about the mechanization of selling. Customers have […]