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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
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 […]
What If You Only Have 100 Potential Customers?
Let’s try a thought experiment. I’ll start with a bit of background. When I look at a lot of the “expert” advice in my social feeds, the emphasis is on how we reach and engage more and more customers. This is critical, at least in the thinking of these experts, because those customers we are trying to engage aren’t responding in the numbers we need. So the solution is to cast a wider net, to try to reach more and more. Using this logic, at some point we are trying to reach the roughly 8B people on the planet (I’m […]
Competence Without Confidence Is Meaningless!
We invest billions in developing the competencies of our sellers. We have endless sales training, product training. We have tools giving them the data and information they need to have meaningful conversations with customers. We have conversational intelligence tools, providing “coaching” to improve their ability to talk to customers. We provide role plays and other tools to help them practice these skills in a “safe” environment. We do everything we can to develop the competencies of our people in engaging with customers. And then they get “punched in the face.” * We try to engage the customer. They haven’t read […]