Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Silly Me, I Thought It Is All About The Customer…..
A good friend reminded me of something I have gotten wrong. I was complaining about the mind numbing volume and stupidity of the marketing messages I get. My inbox is filled with emails with people pitching their products and services. I get at least a dozen voicemails, every day, promoting some sort of product we absolutely must have. Most are about products and services that are not applicable to our business—we don’t manufacture anything, so I’m really not interested in supply chain management solutions. We only have 15 people, so our HR needs are very easy. Even those that are […]
Do Your Sellers Have A Future?
Too many leaders seem to have given up. They take high attrition rates/turnover as “the way things are.” They manage strategies around low tenure (11 months for sellers and leaders). Low engagement, the great resignation, quiet quitting are now business constants that leaders have to manage around. Some give excuses, “Well GenZ is like that, they are very mobile and won’t stay with any organization very long…..” But then we see the same issue with every other generation. Too many have given up. At the same time, I seldom hear leaders talking about the implications of this. It represents millions […]
Customer “Systems”
I wrote about how our organizations are sets of interrelated/interdependent subsystems, aggregated to the enterprise system. In that, I shared a perspective about human nature. How, while being well intended, we tend to focus on our jobs/functions, often doing things that inadvertently adversely impacting other parts of the organization. We, also, tend to focus so deeply on optimizing what we do, that we may not understand distant parts of the organization and how our work impacts them. As a refresher, that post is “The foot bone connected to the leg bone…..” Our customers face the same challenges! Like all of […]
Knowing How Things Work, Versus Knowing The Answers
I wrote a post, “Do Sellers Really Understand How Businesses Work.” I wanted to dive more deeply into what this means. In the article, I talked about understanding our customers business strategies, purpose, priorities. I talked about understanding the structure and organization of our customers, learning how they work together to achieve their goals. In other posts I’ve talked about how we apply systems thinking both to better understand our customers businesses, but also to help them improve, change, and grow. Additionally, I talked about how we leverage financial reporting and analyst sessions to better understand our customers, their performance […]
Customers And Sellers, Conflicting Systems
I’ve been writing a series on the importance of systems thinking in buying and selling. A fundamental issue we have to understand is “What happens when two independent systems intersect and have to work together?” As we, sellers, look at the various pieces parts of selling—marketing, sales, customer service, etc—we tend to optimize these systems to achieve our separate goals. We focus on our effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity in generating revenue. Our customers have different systems–most are focused on accomplishing the objectives of their functional organizations and those of their enterprise. There are other “systems,” the way they identify and […]
Work/Life Balance……
We see all sorts of articles about work/life balance. We read about a downside to WFH, the fact that we seem never to leave the job, it intrudes on our home life. We see people putting in long hours and macho attitudes that some how associate hours at work with one’s value. We see people genuinely exhausted from long hours. We see quiet quitting, both associated with hours and with a lack of connectedness with the organization. We have a very real problem. Part of it is organizational and driven by leadership creating workplaces that don’t value people, that don’t […]