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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
Back To The Office….
After 2 years of WFH or WFA defining how we work, some/many of us are going back to the office. Some by choice/preference, some out of meeting a requirement. Before I get much further, the nature of work, how we work, where we work has changed profoundly–and it will continue to be. For many roles, WFH or WFA will continue, and it will be for the better. As a person who has WFA for much of my career, if anything, I’m biased to that choice. While I have had “offices” in all my roles, I was seldom there. Early in […]
Is Thought Leadership Enough?
Thought leadership is important. Helping customers rethink what they are doing, to consider making a change, inciting them to buy is important. Thought leadership helps us stand out as being different than others. Having a point of view, creates interest. Others will want to learn more. We, sometimes, think of thought leadership as insight. It helps us change the conversation to something that is more relevant to our customers, rather than focusing on pitching our products. Customers want to talk about their challenges, issues, problems, and opportunities. They are hungry for ideas, insight, and new approaches. So thought leadership is […]
Is Attrition/Turnover Inevitable?
Every day it seems that I wake up to read new reports about work, the great resignation, people increasingly choosing to be nomads, moving from job to job. On the other side, we see employers, some of the “hottest” companies of the past few years, implementing significant staffing reductions–while also complaining they can’t find enough people to hire. The concept of company loyalty is a historical artifact (interestingly, we never read anything about employer loyalty to their people). Researchers and guru’s proclaim, “suck it up, this is just the way things are, it’s a new work environment……” They provide all […]
Our Customers’ Stories
Organizations spend millions in creating content. A key element is content from our customers. It’s usually case studies about how fantastic our products are. How we’ve saved them millions, how they’ve been able to achieve their goals because of the what we’ve provided them. Alternatively, there are testimonials. Usually we see them sprinkled through web sites, a picture of a customer or a company logo, with a pithy comment about how wonderful our company is, or how great our solutions are. Often, we have webinars, carefully crafted, inviting our showcase customers to participate. Or we invite them to speak at […]
Improv In Selling
Readers might be a little surprised about the concept of Improv In Selling. Some would reflect on how overly scripted sales conversations are. We are trained to follow the script, not deviating, even if that’s not what the customer cares about. Others would laugh at the concept of improv, saying that sales people are always winging it, shooting from the lip. They would excuse this, suggesting, “we’ve been involved in 100s to 1000s of calls, we can handle everything.” And, usually, they fail. Some would be somewhere in between, suggesting we have to follow the process and never deviate. So […]
Rethinking Insights
Everything in selling today is about “Insight.” But we make insights more complicated than they need be. We tend to think that insights are game changing things we can tell customers. Whether it’s industry/market data, things that are happening in the industry, observations about what is happening with their customers or competitors; we believe we need to make a statement or take a position. While these are useful if we have that information, insights can be much simpler. And insights can be much more personal and relevant than an industry disruption. The purpose of insight is to provoke the customer […]