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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
What Is “Salesmanship?”
I read a fascinating article by Kelly Fairchild. She talked about “salesmanship.” It got me to thinking about, “What is salesmanship?” Based on the conversations I have with sellers and my social feeds, people seem to think salesmanship has to do with the following: Hitting quota, making commission.Beating the competition.Pitching products/solutions.Prospecting, getting meetings.Executing messaging sequences and outreaches across all channels to get meetings.Persuading people to buy our products.Overcoming objections and resistance.Negotiating to close.Beating the competition.Leveraging language and techniques that trigger people to buy your solution.Maximizing our time to sell.Filling our pipelines.Moving the customers to buy as quickly as possible.and on […]
Hacking Business Acumen With ChatGPT
Regular readers will know among a number of things, I’m obsessed with ChatGPT and I’m obsessed with business acumen. I decided to test how Chat could help us better understand and connect with our customers. I’ve mixed feelings about it, but realized my expectations may be unrealistic. For sellers having no or very basic understanding of how businesses work, key business drivers for a role or industry, ChatGPT can be a very quick hack to learning about key issues and challenges. There are a few few caveats: Most of the responses provided don’t provide deep insights or “aha” moments. They […]
The Subjectiveness Of Value
I’m a fan of Larry Levine, he provokes thoughtful discussions. Recently he led a discussion around value creation comparing two organizations with very different value propositions, Walmart and Nordstroms. The conversation was interesting, a little confusing. Some were taking positions the “high touch” of the Nordstrom experience is superior to that of the low touch, low cost (?) experience of Walmart. Clearly, both companies have very different strategies around their customer experience and value proposition. And their respective customers don’t expect a convergence of those strategies. I happen to shop at both, and I enjoy and value the experience I […]
Blinded By The Hype
In the late 70’s I was captivated by the song, “Blinded By The Light,” performed by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. It was one of those “pump you up songs.” I’d listed to it during my morning runs along the East River. Listened as I was starting my day in the office. I didn’t realize for a few months that Bruce Springsteen had written and recorded it in the early 70’s. With respect to Bruce, I always liked Manfred Mann’s version better. Recently, I’ve been thinking about the song as I look at all the stuff going on with ChatGPT in […]
Why Do We Think Our Customers Know What They Are Doing?
Shout out to my friends Matt Heinz and Brent Adamson. In listening to their weekly webcast, for a few moments, Brent was whining about the issue of “Why do we think our customers know what they are doing?” It’s an important issue. It’s an important opportunity for sellers to be truly helpful with customers. Let me be clear, our customers know their business, their work, workflows and how they get things done. Undoubtedly, they are experts in their jobs. We can never come close to them in their knowledge and expertise. Even if we’ve held similar jobs, the specific situations […]
Preaching To The Choir…..
I was confronted with a really discomforting thought today. As I listened to a brilliant webcast hosted by Aaron Evans, with Todd Caponi, Matt Dixon, and Anthony Iannarino. It was a brilliant discussion. The comments from the 300 plus participants showed the wild agreement from the audience. But then, I realized, while interesting, informative and, sometimes, entertaining (Matt, I get such great joy in laughing at you….), I realized the audience weren’t the people that needed to hear this. They had all bought in, we each picked up something new and learned, but the people that need to think about […]