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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 Ethics Of The “Unsubscribe”
Recently, I’ve had some “interesting” conversations with the CMOs about their email marketing strategies and the marketing messages they are inflicting on me. I There are different laws, regulations and recommended practices on email marketing, both how one gets placed onto and email marketing list and how one “unsubscribes.” The CAN-SPAM act is one of the simplest/most benign from a marketing point of view. Things like GDPR have some tougher conditions. Somehow in the regulations, one can “subscribe” to email marketing outreaches simply through emailing a question, downloading a paper, or making a purchase. Even if a person is not […]
Critical Selling Skill: Literacy
Reading Is Fundamental has been the mantra of a children’s literacy not for profit by the same name. I’m writing the management team to suggest they expand their services and offerings to sales people. Like everyone, I get inundated with emails and social platform prospecting outreaches. They fall into three categories: Less than 1% are relevant, interesting and I follow up to learn more. About 50% are irrelevant, unfocused, and just uninteresting. They are usually not the greatest prose, but at least I get their point, regardless of how bad they are. About 49% are unreadable. They may be something […]
The Algorithm Conundrum
Everything in marketing and sales is about “the algorithm.” Each of us is a critical part of algorithm’s–actually we are probably critical parts of hundreds to thousands of algorithms, since each is optimized for different purposes. There are algorithms that track our online behaviors, theoretically to present content that is more aligned to interests derived from our behaviors. The theory is to make it easier to find things the algorithms think we might be interested in. Since the algorithms, are designed an implemented by people other than ourselves, the reality is they better serve the designers’ interests than ours. That […]
Settling…….
Our jobs, as sales and marketing professionals, is to drive change. We can only do our jobs when our customers decide their current state is unacceptable. They need to address new opportunities, they need to solve problems, they need to rethink and do things differently. Often, customers incite themselves to change. Perhaps it’s problems, perhaps competitive threat, perhaps it’s being opportunistic. Sometimes there is a visionary leader that provokes that change. Sometimes, it’s we that incent the customers to change, whether through our content at our websites, our customers talking to others, or our prospecting. Our ideal customers are those […]
If Practice Makes Perfect, Why Do We Keep Practicing The Wrong Things?
We know to master any skill, it takes practice. It may be Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours to mastery. Or we look at what great athletes, artist, musicians, and others do. They are constantly practicing to improve their skills and capabilities. We know that to get really good at anything, we have to continue to work on developing our capabilities to do the things that produce the outcomes we hope to achieve. With sales, it’s no different. We have to continue to practice, we have to develop our skills, learning and improving our ability to execute. We learn through repeated prospecting […]
There Is No Excuse For Not Doing Your Homework!
To the annoyance of most school children, virtually every night, their parents ask a question, “Did you do your homework?” Growing up, sometimes I would blow off doing my homework, I’d not lie, but I’d find a way not to answer the question. Eventually, that would catch up with me, I’d not be prepared for class, my grades would suffer. I learned, it was easier and better to do my homework, then to fake it. Sometimes, particularly, on difficult assignments, my parents would review my homework. They weren’t doing it to check up on me, but they wanted to help […]