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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
Focus On Your People’s Strengths, Not Their Weaknesses???
There are a number of thoughtful articles suggesting we get better results in developing our people by focusing on their developing their strengths, not “fixing” them, or criticizing their weaknesses. A recent HBR article, Developing Employees’ Strengths Boosts Sales, Profit, and Engagement, presents compelling data about organizations focusing on strengths based interventions (I guess that’s HBR speak for coaching). In general, I think it’s sound advice. Intuitively, it’s easy to see how you get employees enthusiastic and engaged in improving the things they do well. At a macro level, if we look across large organizations, the more people do what […]
#First Seven Jobs With Pat O’Brien
There’s a series going around the web about people’s First Seven Jobs. It’s been fun and fascinating to see the very first jobs people held. There’s a diverse selection of people’s first seven jobs here, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, and Keenan. I jumped onto the bandwagon with my first 7 jobs. In the comments, you can also see Hank Barnes’ first seven. It’s actually a huge amount of fun–first thinking about your own, reflecting on what they meant to you (privately) and seeing others’ experience. Consequently, I’ve invited a huge number of people of diverse backgrounds, ages, and locations, to […]
Bits And Pieces — October 1, 2016
Here are a few things I’m learning, reading, and watching. What I’m Studying: I’ve become fascinated with chatbots. They have the potential of changing the way we work and interact. I haven’t found a lot of great resources on them, so I’d appreciate any links or resources you might point me to. I’m looking at a couple to start experimenting with, these will help me manage my schedules, priorities, to-dos. I’ll share how they’re working for me in the coming weeks. The Filter Bubble: I’ve written about this in the past, but wanted to bring it up again. More and more, […]
Focus On The Customer Journey, Not Their Buying Journey
Over the years, we’ve made some progress, shifting our focus from our Selling Process to the Customer Buying Journey. We’ve finally recognized the customer is in control–funny, I always thought they were. We know that focusing on their Buying Journey, aligning our Selling Process with their journey is critical to our success (selfishly speaking.) We know they struggle to buy, often abandoning the process at some point, largely because they can’t align the agendas and priorities of the 6.8 people involved in the buying decision. We know that top sales professionals create value not just in the value produced by […]
Fear And Loathing: The Sales And Marketing Technology Stacks
As many of us prepare to descend on Dreamforce 2016, I look at it with some trepidation. Not the event, it’s fantastic, I see a lot of old friends, meet new people, and learn a huge amount. It seems Dreamforce has become the magnet for all the sales and marketing automation suppliers to trot out their shiny new toys and releases, enticing us to buy. I have dozens of people reaching out, wanting to introduce me to their latest greatest technologies oriented at helping sales and marketing professionals. The goal of all these systems is, theoretically, to help sales and […]
Managers, How Are You Investing Your Time?
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing on the phone. It was a frustrated sales person looking for help. She had reached out after reading some blogs, asking me to be a sounding board for some deals she was struggling with. We spent some time talking about the deals, exploring what she might do to better position herself to win. At the end of the conversation, I asked, “Have you sat down with your manager to review this and get his advice? She responded that she had tried to. “He’s always very busy and just doesn’t seem to have the […]