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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
My Bot Will Chat With Your Bot
We are just in the infancy of trying to understand and exploit AI/ML technologies in sales and marketing. AI offers us tremendous capability in more effectively identifying, targeting, and engaging prospects with much greater relevance/impact. Having said that, there is something missing in every discussion I read or hear about leveraging AI/ML in marketing and selling. The discussions focus on how we leverage these technologies in engaging a human buyer. The reality is the buying and procurement side are already leveraging AI/ML technologies as or more aggressively than sales. Buyers are leveraging these technologies to sort through the overwhelming digital […]
Why Are We Committed To Failure?
Regular readers might be a little worried with many of my recent posts. I’m obsessed with the idea of failure. You can imagine the “uplifting” conversations I have at lunch or with colleagues on failure. It’s not driven by any sort of negative outlook, premonitions of “doom and gloom,” or a closed mindset. In reality, it’s quite the opposite, it’s driven by extreme optimism and hope. We will never eliminate failure, but if we can better understand it and why we fail, we can discover more opportunities to succeed. I’m trying to better understand the mechanisms for failure. What causes […]
Learning From Failure
None of us like to admit failure, we tend to want to celebrate our successes. We have a mindset that says, “Do more of what causes you to succeed!” I suppose it’s human nature to accentuate the positive, but I think it limits us, individually and organizationally. Success is not the strict opposite of failure. Focusing on why we succeed limits us to understanding a small subset of the opportunity. It limits our ability to learn, grow, and achieve. It also blinds us to the need to change. Our, our competitors, and our customer’s worlds are constantly changing. By limiting […]
Cold Calling Never Went Out Of Style
Recently, someone made a comment saying, “It’s interesting to see cold calling coming back into style…..” The comment startled me, and I can see where the speaker was coming from, but I couldn’t have disagreed more. The reality is cold calling has never gone out of style. As you look at the performance of consistent top sales performers, you see they always have held themselves accountable for making sure they generated a sufficient number of opportunities to achieve their goals, quarter after quarter, year after year. These top performers realized they needed to find these opportunities, hunting for them. They […]
Hiring For “Caring”
My good friend, Buck McGugan, and I were having a conversation about sales performance. We were talking about what separates consistent high performers from everyone else. There were the usual competencies, we tend to think about–curiosity, business acumen, comfort with talking with money, resilience, mindset, and so forth. But then we started talking about “Caring.” All of a sudden, at the core of sales performance is this thing called caring. We started talking about what this really means, discovering it has many dimensions: Do you care about your customer? For too many sales people, our “caring” for the customer is […]
“What’s Next?” The Need For Specificity
I spend a lot of time in reviews of all sorts. They could be deal/opportunity reviews, territory, account, call, pipeline, forecast reviews. Some are performance reviews. Some are internal projects. Sometimes, I feel like I’m a broken record in the reviews. Inevitably, at some point, I always ask the same question, “What’s next?” I’m trying to understand what their action plan is, what they are doing to move the opportunity forward, to grow their share of account/territory, and so forth. I want to understand the most important things that need to be done to achieve their objective. The responses to […]