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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
Starting With A Blank Sheet Of Paper
I’d like to go through a thought experiment. You can play along, take out a sheet of paper or open a blank document. First, as an introduction, our mental models and experience are often great help in understanding our jobs, how we are successful, and how we perform. We all have mental models, our organizations have shared models, enabling us to align, communicate in shorthand, and make sure we are all doing the things important to achieving our goals. But sometimes our mental models and our past experiences are limiting. If we are driven to transform or change radically, our […]
How “Sales-speak” Limits Us
Every profession has it’s own language. It’s a shorthand that enables people in the profession to more effectively and efficiently communicate with each other and to get things done. For example, finance types talk about debits, credits, accruals, depreciation, assets, liabilities, and so forth. They have their own acronyms like A/R, A/P ROCA, EBITDA and so forth. If you are a financial professional every other financial professional understand you, as a result you can have very productive conversations. They also have tools like income statements, balance sheets, cashflow statements, budgets that help them look at or model various situationsLikewise, engineers, […]
On Civility
It seems everywhere one looks, one is confronted with incivility. Virtually everything we see in the news–regardless where you live, what your political leanings, it seems our leaders cannot be civil with each other or even to the people they represent. Social media is plagued with incivility. Whether hiding in anonymity, emboldened by not having to deal face to face, every day we experience unspeakable behaviors and actions. In our day to day work, whether it is with colleagues, partners, customers, increasingly we see incivility. The problem is incivility is so limiting. It stops us from learning, growing. We limit […]
What’s The Customer Business Problem?
My friend, Tim Ohai, made an interesting statement, “Sadly many sales people have no idea how to identify when no customer problem exists.” I think there is a lot of truth to the statement. Perhaps the reality is that too many sales people aren’t even identifying the customer problem–the customer is. There’s some evidence to support this, increasingly, sales people are getting involved later in the customer buying process. Depending on the research you believe, the customer is anywhere between 57-90% through their buying process when they first engage sales people. The customer has already determined they have a problem, […]
The New Value Proposition: Sense Making
As it should, the concept of the value proposition has changed dramatically over decades. When I was taught the concept of a value proposition, back as people were just learning how to shape wheels from stones, it was basically an enhanced version of feature, advantage, benefit (FABs). Over time, the value proposition became a financially justified business proposal, demonstrating the specific improvements the customer should expect from our solutions. These value propositions focused on revenue/profit increases, cost reduction. Some versions would look at quality, productivity, the experience our customer could create for their customer and so on. These principles of […]
Getting By Or Getting Ahead
Most mornings, I feel like Bill Murray in Ground Hog Day. I get up, look at my news feed reading blog posts on sales, sales management, marketing, business management. I spend a few minutes looking at conversations on LinkedIn, Twitter, and other sources. Day after day, month after month, year after year, it’s the same thing. I’ve been actively writing this blog since 2007. Go back to those older posts. You will find that I talked/ranted about the same issues in 2007 that I am currently ranting about. I’m sometimes embarrassed, at the bottom of each of my posts, you […]