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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 Happens When The Incremental Costs Of Developing Content Is $0?
Some of you may have been following my adventures and experiments with ChatGPT. It and similar tools are fascinating, and while being very early in their development, offer interesting potential in the coming years. When makinq queries in ChatGPT, the responses represent faux–dare I say–artificial intelligence. The responses “seem” smart, but aren’t particularly insightful. The tool assembles a collection of well constructed sentences, identifying very high level issues, presenting balanced observations. But nothing new. No insights that cause one to think, “That’s interesting, I’ve never considered this before.” When I engage the tool in a “conversation,” responding to the observations, […]
On Discomfort And Familiarity….
A characteristic of every human being is the tension between Discomfort and Familiarity. Some of you might respond, appropriately, “Well Duugghhh Dave, isn’t that why it’s called discomfort?” It’s obvious, we are comfortable with that which is familiar. How we work, how we spend our time, where/who we find joy. The more familiar it, is the more comfort we have, the more we tend to stick with doing the familiar. Even if they don’t produce the outcomes we want, even if they don’t make us happy, we are programmed to “seek what we have known.”* Our challenge with change, often […]
“Customers Are Taking A More Measured Approach To Their Purchasing Decisions”
In announcing reductions at Salesforce yesterday, Marc Benioff was quoted, saying customers “are taking a more measured approach to their purchasing decisions.” We’re taking deep breaths, trying to understand what that means, looking at how we, sellers, respond and move forward. What does it take to succeed? Pile onto this all the shifts in buyer behavior we see, increasing numbers of buyers actively disengaging with sellers, preferring to navigate their buying processes with out sales help. From a seller point of view, there will be far fewer organizations buying–deferring or eliminating initiatives, and for those that do, it’s becoming impossible […]
THINK
A little over 40 years ago, in mid June, I walked into the lobby of 205 E42nd Street in Manhattan. I took the elevator to the 11th floor and walked in to the reception area of IBM’s NY Financial Branch Office. About a week earlier, I had graduated from UCLA with my MBA. I didn’t take much time off, I was so excited about starting my new job selling computer systems for IBM. The branch had a little over 100 people, about 40 sales people (they called us marketing reps) about 50 sales engineers, and about 15 support people. The […]
Starting Over….
Selling is one of the few roles in business where, every year, we get to start over. We have the proverbial “clean sheet.” We may have been a superstar in the past year, exceeding all our goals. Today, it’s “What have you done for us lately?” Or we may have struggled, falling short of our goals. Today, we are on equal footing with the superstars. Our organizations use this time as a time to refocus and refresh. There may be new strategies, new focus areas, new challenges, and certainly new goals. Regardless of how the organization performed last year, it’s […]
It Doesn’t Get Easier!
I seldom respond to “viral videos.” But I was struck by this video of Kara Lawson, Duke Women’s Basketball Head Coach, Handle Hard Better. It is human nature to want things to be easier. In 2005, Staples ran a marketing campaign featuring the “Easy Button.” The concept went viral–the thought that if we just did one thing, things after that would be easy. This thinking seems to persist today, dominating much of what we seek in our work. If we do “this technique,” everything becomes easy. And these collections of techniques cover every aspect of what we do in selling. […]