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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
How I’m Using ChatGPT
I’ve been writing a lot of posts about my experiences with ChatGPT. It takes time to learn, it takes time to figure out how to refine a series of queries, prompts to explore issues. While many are reveling in ChatGPT’s ability to paper the world with endless amounts of drivel, I mean content, I find it not that useful. Even with a lot of prompting, it’s content is mediocre. It lacks data, it lacks specifics. The time it takes to refine a story around issues–well, I could write it from scratch more quickly (And I can submit it to GPT […]
Activity As A Proxy For Productivity
The good news/bad news, is that we have so many selling and marketing tools providing us endless amounts of data–particularly around activity. We can count the number of emails, opens, click throughs. We count the number of dials, voicemails, conversations. As our work, increasingly, is done through our devices, we can measure how much time our people are spending on virtually every aspect of their job. How much and what research they are doing. How active they are through the day. We measure everything about every deal in their pipelines. We count the number of meetings, calls, demos, proposals made. […]
Losing Focus, Prone To Distraction….
I’m sitting at my desk, staring at my computer screen—actually screens. Like you, I have dozens of windows open. Some have been open for days and I forgot about them. I have two 30 inch screens. I need them to fit all the different windows I keep open. I need them to keep me aware and “productive.” Right now, I’m working on writing this post, but out of the corner of my eye, I see google messaging me that 5 emails landed in my inbox–that’s new in the last 5 minutes. I also see LinkedIn signaling me with a number […]
What If We Sold The Way Our Customers Want To Buy?
Calm down, give me a few moments to defend my case. I know it’s an absurd concept–selling the way our customers want to buy. Afterall, we have our quotas. We have our cadences, sequences, we have to reach out to hundreds or thousands of people a day, we have to constantly be pitching. We have to fill our pipelines, we have to move prospects through our process, we have to move them to a fast decision. We have our process, we have to execute it, we have to produce results! Don’t slow us down, we have work to do. Yet, […]
Value Creation Is Really About Building Value Continuously
We need to develop a deeper understanding of the value creation/realization process. Too many sellers tend to think about value creation as something sellers create “for” customers. Sellers focus on the value customers receive in the implementation of their solution, or “value realization.” Sellers focus, often using sophisticated analytic tools, on the return customers would get in implementation. The strategy usually suggests that, somehow, the value a customer might realize is greater than that which they might realize with any other alternative. Probably, more often, sellers talk about features/benefits, leverage similar situations and how these help the customer achieve their […]
What If We Focused On The Questions, Rather Than The Answers?
We know questions are important, but somehow they seem to slow us down. Most sellers rush to providing answers, to pitching products, features, advantages, benefits. Sellers carefully filter through qualification and discovery questions, trying to narrow them to the critical few that enable them to launch into a pitch. Or too often, we bypass them altogether. Most prospecting voicemails, emails, messages seem to assume I have a problem, focus on presenting a solution. When one responds to the outreach, the primary questions are, “how many seats, when are you making a decision, do you have budget, are you the decisionmaker….” […]