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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 Value Are You Creating?
Sometimes, I think we think about value too restrictively. Historically, we tended to focus value as something we did exclusively “for” customers. As sellers we know that value creation and realization are critical in engaging our customers. In recent years, we’ve started looking at value creation more broadly. We’ve started looking at it as a collaborative process, working with our customers. And we start creating value from our very first engagement, continuing to build on that in each interaction with the customer, through their buying and implementation process. And we’ve learned it doesn’t end with the successful implementation of our […]
Going For The Upsell Before You Get The Order…..
Some of you may have read about the “cyclone storms” we are having in Northern California. Rain that we haven’t experience in at least a decade. That accompanied by powerful wind gusts. We’ve been hit by flooding and downed trees. I’ve been fortunate, my property is too high and positioned so flooding is not a worry. But the property is filled with the most beautiful blue oak trees. Watching their branches being whipped around in the high winds was nerve wracking. And I lost one. A 60 foot tree in the side yard went down. It went down on a […]
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 […]