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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
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….” […]
Why Do We Measure “Working Hard” In Hours?
I happen to be in the camp of people that believe we should be working hard! We should be doing everything we can to be achieving our goals, fulfilling our responsibilities, and achieving our dreams. I’m one of those hard nosed people who believe anything short of that cheats those we work with/for, but most importantly, ourselves. By not behaving in that way, we fail to fulfill our commitments, and possibly potential. But, I’m not sure that’s a widely held view of working hard. It seems the more common view is the “nose to the grindstone” view, judging working hard […]
Buyers Using ChatGPT……
There’s a lot of excitement from sellers about the power of AI tools like ChatGPT, we can inflict infinite amounts of content on unsuspecting prospects. We can meet and exceed Gartner’s projection of 66 touches per meeting with all sorts of sequences that can be generated in a few minutes. Sellers of all types are foaming at the mouth about how we leverage this tool to expand our outreach. My LinkedIn stream is filled with all sorts of “expert” advice for generating content through AI. But these tools are not just for us in sales, marketing, customer experience? Think of […]
Making Selling Easier
It’s human nature to search for easier ways to get our work done. Selling will never be easy, but there’s a lot that we can do to simplify the work, enabling us to achieve more than we currently do. Somehow, however, we tend to do the things that don’t make selling easier. We avoid the things that improve our effectiveness. We aren’t as efficient as we could be. In the past years, responses to our prospecting outreaches have plummeted, as a result we have to up the volumes and work that we do to get the same number of prospects […]
Managing Your Manager
If we are to be successful in achieving our goals–both for the short term and longer term developmental goals, we have to manage our managers. We have to get them to help us getting things done, learning and growing. We need them to focus, with us, both on our short term goals, but also on our long term development. Great leaders and managers already know this. They work closely with each person on their teams, aligning expectation each has of each other, listening, coaching, supporting/removing barriers. They focus both on short term performance, and on their long term development. They […]