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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
Educating Our Customers….
Hank Barnes wrote a brilliant post, “A Question Of Prospect Education” It’s an important post, be sure to read it. We tend, to often, to get this wrong. When we educate our customers, whether inbound or outbound, we tend to educate our customers on “Why buy us!” We focus on discussions around the presumption they are well educated on the issues, buying, change; focusing our discussions on proving the superiority of our solutions/products over the alternatives they may consider. We make a giant leap forward, too often, leaving our customers behind; lost, confused, and fumbling in their change and buying […]
“Can You Help Us……?”
“Can you help us…….” is music to every seller’s ears. It’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it’s the “Ka–Ching” that sounds when we hit the jackpot. It’s the foundation of all inbound. We leap into action demonstrating how our products answer the customer’s question, we talk about how we are the right company to “help” them. But there’s problem, not enough prospects are coming to us with that question. For those that do, we do everything we can to get them to choose us, but the reality there is never enough, We need more! And […]
Is Outbound Dying?
I’m breaking into a nervous sweat just writing the title to this post. As a person who thinks prospecting is so vital, and properly done, so powerful, I am in a quandary writing this post. How do we incite customers to change when they don’t recognize they may need to change? How do we drive sufficient levels of demand to achieve our goals? How do we standout when customers are overwhelmed with information–particularly as we look at tools like ChatGPT enabling us to create reams of both good content and crap. Is more content even the answer or does it […]
“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, […]