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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
Sellers, Your Customers Don’t Need You Anymore
Sales people used to be a primary source of information for customers. They learned about new approaches to business, they learned about what other similar organizations were doing, they learned about new products and services they might consider through sales people. Those days are long gone. Customers have far easier ways to learn these things when they are searching. In fact, when they are on a buying journey, less than 17 percent of their time is spent with sales people–all sales people. Their primary sources of learning are from digital and other sources, and from each other. This should be […]
Great Design Starts From The Outside
I’ve spent some portion of my career with product designers. It has given me the opportunity to hang out with a lot of interesting people, whether they designed automobiles, airplanes, mobile devices, buildings, or even fashions. Regardless of the product, when they approached design, they started on the outside–the parts visible to the customer and the parts the customer interacted with. They knew it was these parts of the product that attracted the customer and had the major impact on their experience both in buying and using the product. Most of the time, it was in the parts of the […]
The Future Of Work Is About More Than Work!
We are facing, possibly, the greatest transformation in the nature of work since the industrial revolution–where we moved from primarily agrarian based work to industrial work. Many think this is being driven by technology, AI/ML. While these will have impact, much like mass automation, computers, the web, there is something deeper driving this revolution in redefining work. Somehow, particularly at the highest levels of business and government we lose sight of the fact that, at it;s core, work is really about people. We read, increasingly, about the “Great Resignation.” In reality, it’s what my friend, Rachel Happe, calls the Great […]
What Got Us Here Won’t Get Us To Where We Need To Be!
The one thing constant in this world is change! Thankfully, if this wasn’t a universal constant, the prospects for all sellers would be bleak. If our customers see no reason to change, there is no reason to buy. So it’s the need to change, the recognition, by our customers, that what is currently working, might be improved or done differently, alternatively, the need to do something new to address new opportunities that keeps us in business. Customers start buying cycles, inviting us to work with them, or we incite them to change, out of the recognition that what got them […]
The Problem With The Data….
Data has always been a little problematic. Too often, we find the data that supports what the views we may have already formed. We may have problems with certain people, we find the data that supports them being the wrong people, so we can move them out of the organization. Alternatively, we have a person we really like, or a program, or a change initiatives. We find the data to support what we want to do. Sometimes we use the data to help us identify problem areas, developing plans to improve. For example, no self respecting sales person/manager would find […]
Pet Peeves–LinkedIn Surveys
This is #B2BPetPeeves week (Thanks Hank Barnes and friends). This morning I started scrolling through my LinkedIn Feed. I hit my first LinkedIn Survey, “How much profit is ‘enough?’” It had the following choices, $50-100K/year, $100-300K/year, $300-600K/year, $600k-1M/year. Huh??????? I thought I misread it. I went to look at Microsoft’s net income for it’s past fiscal year, $61B. Then I looked at Amazon’s, $21.3B. Then Facebook’s, $10.3 B. I could go, but you get the point. What does this question even mean? Yet it had generated 875 votes, 137 “likes,” and 39 comments–my favorite started with, “You are playing with […]