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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
The Opportunities We Are Blind To
Content marketing is going to save the world! Customers will let their fingers do the digital walking, SEO, PPC and other techniques will enable those customers to find us, our marketing automation tools will capture and nurture those customers through their quest to learn, SDR’s will intercept them at just the right point and then we magically have a qualified opportunity. At least that’s what many would have you believe. If it produces enough qualified deals to achieve your growth goals, then I suppose, it’s not a bad strategy. But I wonder about all the opportunities we miss, all the […]
Power Is Not What You Think It Is
We have a lot of ideas about power and influence. Too often, they are wrong and misguided. Perhaps driven by watching terrible movies or TV shows, bad stereotypes, or bad examples set by those perceived to be “in power.” Non managers, new managers, and bad managers tend to have very naïve or bad views of power. The latter group are probably clueless and never will care, so this is directed to the former two and others who want to think about it differently. To be honest, I’ve learned this over a long time, with some painful experience. Growing up, I […]
Change Your Job Every 3 Years?
I read a fascinating article in Fast Company, You Should Plan On Switching Your Job Every 3 Years For The Rest Of Your Life. One point leapt out to me, job hoppers (at least high performance job hoppers) are fast learners and much more adaptable. The argument is, to be able to fit in, job hoppers have a very fast learning curve, quickly learning how to fit in, contribute and have an impact. It’s an intriguing and powerful thought. On reflection, however, I realized, no job and few companies can afford to stay the same for 3 years. Stated differently, your […]
On Miscommunicating
We know what we want to communicate, –it may be something we need to say to our customers to teach, engage, or convince them. –it may be to our people, to coach and improve their ability to execute. –it may be to our peers to drive a strategy or a change initiative. We know what we want to communicate and we formulate the words that express what we want to communicate. The problem is, the people we are trying to communicate to don’t know what we are trying to communicate. All they hear or read is our words. Our words […]
Probably The Worst Email Marketing Campaign I’ve Gotten
I’ve refrained for some time whining about bad marketing. After a while, it gets to be writing about the same bad practices time after time, we don’t learn much. I, also, reserve my critiques for “professionals.” It would be unfair, though possibly not unreasonable, to use a bad marketing campaign from and industrial products company, or a an ERP software company, or similar organizations. They simply may not know what “good marketing” looks like. I tend to reserve my critiques for professionals—those who should know better. For example, marketing services companies should know what great marketing looks like and execute […]
Are They At 57% Yet?
As a kid, I recall many of our family vacations involved long drives to some place or other. Inevitably, after my sisters and I exhausted the car games we played in the back seat, we’d eventually start whining to Dad, “Are we there yet?” Fast forward to today, I get the sense that too many sales and marketing people adopt the same view about customers, “Are they to 57% yet?” (Hopefully you know, according to CEB, the customer is 57% through their buying process before engaging sales. Depending on whose market research you trust, that figure gets up to 92%). […]