Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
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. […]
And The Insanity Continues…….
Actually, I’m surprised it’s taken this long. People, including me, have been experimenting with ChatGPT. It’s an exciting tool, offering interesting potential. But, I’ve been waiting for the people to exploit this tool to fill our inboxes and feeds with “junk.” And we are starting to see the “experts/gurus” giving advice about how ChatGPT can be used to generate more and more content. These experts offer us the magic tricks to get ChatGPT to generate endless content with which to fill inboxes. So I decided to do an experiment: Dave asks ChatGPT: “What are different questions I could be asking […]
Can You Answer These Two Questions?
This is Pop Quiz, answer these two questions—choose any of your important customers to think about the answers: How does your customer make money? How do your customers think? These are two fundamental questions–they are what dominates your customers’ thinking. To engage our customers in business relevant conversations, we have to be able to answer and talk about these two questions. Some of you may be thinking, “Dave, this is easy, they sell stuff and get revenues from those sales……” But that doesn’t answer the question of, “How do customers make money?” There are hundreds of things the customers must […]
Have We Become Complacent?
I’m a great fan of Jeffrey Phillips writing on all aspects of innovation. Recently, he wrote an intriguing post, Will You Shape Innovation Or Will It Shape You? It’s fascinating and a few sentences in the middle of the post struck me, getting my mind spinning on a question for sellers, “Have we become complacent?” Since we are approaching year-end, it’s often a time to sit back and reflect. Think about the issue and your own selling organizations. We have plenty of evidence that might indicate we have, perhaps unwittingly, become complacent. At least 10 years of a relatively robust […]