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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
When Are We Going To Integrate Sales And Marketing?
We know customers want to us to engage them differently. There’s all sorts of research that says customers want to self educate. Other research showing that customers are engaging sales people later in the process–largely after they have determined the problem, determines their needs and requirements, and in fact narrowed their solution alternatives to a few choices (of which they are indifferent). Likewise, sales and marketing are facing pressures. Recognizing the desire of customers to self educate or to avoid seeing sales people, they are providing more content. Using marketing automation tools, they are able to “move” the customer through their […]
You Have To Start At The Beginning
The other evening, I was relaxing, watching something on Netflix. It was a mystery thriller, with quite a complex plot that had taken some very interesting twists and turns. I was a two thirds of the way through the movie (70% to be precise), when my wife joined me. She had been busy doing some things, but when she sat down, she immediately started asking: What’s happened? I don’t understand why this character is doing this? What are they referring to here? I made it through about another 5 minutes of the movie, but all her questions were distracting me […]
Gratitude
All of us get caught up in the swirl of activities around us. Business, friends, family, community—we struggle with balancing everything going on, we do the best we can. Inevitably the we get swept up in something urgent often overlooking the important. Then something happens that causes us to stop, pause and reflect. This week a reader — Mike (I won’t embarrass him by giving you his full name, he can claim it in the comments if he wants) did something unusual and very touching. Mike reached did something special as a means of thanking me for the blog and […]
The Most Important Improvement In Efficiency, Actually Talking To People
Everyone is time poor. We have too much on our plates–more than we possibly can accomplish. We’re inundated with emails, messages, phone calls, meetings. The growth of our “To-Do” lists far outpaces out “Completed” lists. In attempts to bring sanity and manageability into our lives, we leverage all sorts of tools and techniques to improve our efficiency. Too often, over time, our quest for efficiency makes us very efficient–that is we get a lot of activities done–but has an adverse impact on our results. We get caught up in endless emails streams–back and forth, back and forth, ping, pong…….., yet […]
Learning To Teach
I’ve been writing about “teaching our customers” these days. To often, what I see of teaching is a more advanced form of a pitch. Rather than pitching our products, we are now pitching business issues the customer should be concerned about. Perhaps they are trends in the industry, opportunities they may be missing, opportunities for them to improve their operations. I suppose there is some merit to this, at least we are talking about the customers’ issues and not about our products. But too often, they don’t translate to collaborative discussions, shared learning, and taking action with the customer. It’s also curious, that we seem to […]
Creating Crap At The Speed Of Light!
Everyone is talking about social selling! We have new tools, techniques, and capabilities to engage more people, more differently than we ever have before. Social selling dominates many conversations. Many would have you think social selling (social media, social marketing, social business, or whatever you call it) is the silver bullet. Just do thing socially, prospects will come out of the woodwork, they’ll engage, they’ll pull out PO’s–pre-empting your twitter stream, blog posts, LinkedIn outreach. Often, it seems to be a Field of Dreams approach, “If we do it socially, they will come.” Social engagement has changed our business profoundly. […]