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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
Can We Be Helpful And Still Make Our Quotas?
When I read my feeds or listen to a lot of “experts,” the focus is always on hitting our quotas, maxing our commissions, achieving our goals. Listening to sales executives, the focus is, constantly, making your numbers. And then there are the consequences of not doing so. Our jobs are at stake, even our companies are threatened. One imagines a sword of Damocles hanging over seller’s heads with the constant threat of making quota. Then you have people like me saying, “You have to be helpful to your customers, you have to create value in their buying process!” The reaction, […]
What’s Really Possible
Just a quick interruption of your Sunday, but I want to make sure you are aware of a fantastic new resource—one focused on helping us create better futures for ourselves, each other, and our communities. It’s important and exciting! Jill Konrath has just launched her new vision and with that her new site, What’s Really Possible. For some time, Jill and I have been talking about what’s happening in our worlds. We see increasing challenges and confusion in our communities, country, and in the world. Too often, we find it difficult to have reasonable conversations, discussing these issues, sharing different […]
Telling Us What We Want To Hear…
The latest generations of AI tools seem to be offering us the “miracle cures,” to all our selling challenges. Our feeds are filled with all sorts of tips on leveraging these tools to extend our outreach, generate endless content, free us from many time consuming tasks. We’ve discovered the concept of prompts, questions and directions we provide to refine the responses these tools provide. We’ve learned how to leverage series of prompts to more closely focus the responses we want to get. We marvel at the time we save and the “insights” we are provided. We are, also, recognizing the […]
What About Seller FOMU?
Thanks to the outstanding work by Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna in “The JOLT Effect,” we are now beginning to understand the impact of “Fear of Messing Up,” or FOMU on buying deccisions. (I need to go on record with my preferred version being FOFU.). But what about Seller FOMU/FOFU? Particularly as we look at these very difficult economic times. We read of reductions and layoffs. We see heightened demands for performance and hitting the numbers. The survivors of layoffs, have more on their plates–the numbers haven’t changed but the resources to do achieve them is fewer. Many organizations with […]
“What Does This Mean?”
“What does this mean” is probably the most important question we and our customers are confronted with. And until we can deal with that question in a meaningful, deep way, we will not achieve what we should. We have tools which present us with endless facts, figures, data. They give us answers, directions. Sometimes, they provide insight. Despite what all these resources provide, we are left with the problem of understanding, “What do these mean?” The concept of “what does this mean,” is fundamental to all human learning and growth. It’s the ability to translate the information/data into impact. It’s […]
In Tough Times, Do Less, Better!
As we face tougher business and economic times, I see too many organizations implementing frenzied strategies of doing more–more prospecting, more outreaches, more activities, more deals. And along with that, more meetings discussing why things aren’t working and trying to figure out what more to do. There are the endless management mantras focused on belt tightening, and “doing more with less.” But these strategies are doomed to failure. First, we are probably executing this in the face of fewer resources. Perhaps we have fewer people to execute our strategies. Perhaps we’ve had to reduce programs, support, eliminate tools. So the […]