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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
LinkedIn Automation At It’s Worst!
LinkedIn is fast becoming as useless as many of the other social channels. Most of it is not LinkedIn’s fault—though it’s algorithm seems to favor “Broems.” It’s really the fault of those selling training and LinkedIn automation tools that seek not to create value in relationships, but only to deluge people with mindless messages. Below is a message stream I just received. The only editing I have done is to disguise the sender. It’s unbelievable, I get one of the standard, “Here’s what we do/sell, I’d like to arrange a meeting to see how we can help you.” Where normally, […]
Mistakes Will Be Made….
Too often, we live in fear of failure. We live in fear of making mistakes. In spite of this, mistakes will be made. Too often, bad leaders punish those that have made mistakes, never tolerating failure. In spite of this, mistakes will be made. If we fear making mistakes, we do nothing, because if we did something, we might make a mistake. We revert to what we have always done, ironically, even if it isn’t working as well in the past. We wait and respond, so we don’t make a mistake, when that waiting may have been the mistake. We […]
The “Silver Lining” Behind What We Are Experiencing
In the past 6+ months, the world has turned upside down. We have never faced simultaneous health, economic, social crises at the global scale that we are currently experiencing. We long for things to get back to normal. I dream of sitting in an airport–going to visit a client. Or sitting in a restaurant, enjoying a meal with friends, or going to a concert or the theater, or getting back into the gym. It’s natural to want to get back to our “lives.” But, the pandemic, has created a tremendous opportunity—individually and organizationally. It is forcing us to disrupt ourselves, […]
Is Prospecting Really The Toughest Thing In Sales?
Was just reading yet another post with “market data” declaring prospecting the most difficult aspect of sales. Thousands of blog posts about both the difficulty and importance of prospecting have been published in the past 5-7 years. But is it really tougher than anything else in selling or are we just making it much tougher than it need be? Or possibly our problems are that too many sales people just don’t want to prospect? They want to be handed qualified leads–ideally qualified to the point that all the sales person need to is ask for a PO. Or possibly we […]
Who Are You Learning From?
Yeah, I know I’m dating myself, but I’d like to paraphrase a line from the 1980 Johnny Lee Song, Looking For Love. There’s the famous line, “Looking for love in all the wrong places….” Too often, I think we are looking to learn in all the wrong places. (I’ll come back to those who aren’t even looking to learn.) We, often, tend to overlook great people and places to learn from. Too often, we look to experience. Or with social media, to those with some sort of fame or voice. “They have 10 years more experience than me, they must […]
What Do I Do With The Answers To These Questions?
I had a fascinating call with a young sales person. He’d been reading a lot of my blogs, particularly on the “customer’s why.” He had been trying to apply the concepts in improving his customer conversations. “Dave,” he asked, “I tried everything you suggested in your blogs. I really tried to understand what the customer faced, whey they needed to change, what the consequences of not changing might be. I drilled down in understanding their business and how they felt about what they face. “But, after the conversation, I had all this information and didn’t know what to do with […]