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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
On Gratitude
Today, in the US, it’s Thanksgiving Day. In principle, a day of giving thanks, though most often displaced with overindulging in food and drink, followed by football games or binging on Netflix (now you know my plans). While this is not a novel idea, it’s amazing that we reserve one day, out of 365, for giving thanks. I have to confess, as much as I try, I tend to slip up, not taking the time each day do find something to be grateful for—though there is always so much, when I just pause to reflect. I, also, don’t express my […]
Initiative Overload
Individually and organizationally, we are obsessed with getting things done. It’s important, it’s how we learn, grow, and achieve. Too often, however, this obsession is dysfunctional. We overload ourselves and our organizations with too many things—too many “strategic initiatives,” too many meetings, too many “top priorities,” too much activity. Too often, in our quest to get thing things done, we get nothing done. But we are busy! Too many of us fell victim to the fashion, several years ago, of multitasking–only to find we accomplished much less. Or in some cases, like driving, created real danger. Depending on the scientific […]
How Performance Reviews Can Kill Organizational Culture
I’m an unabashed fan of Shane Parrish and the Farnam Street Blog. I study everything they publish, listen to every podcast, read every article and book they reference. It is the single smartest site I have ever found, I encourage everyone to visit and learn on a regular basis. So it was interesting reading a post, “How Performance Reviews Can Kill Your Culture” I found myself both agreeing with, but strongly disagreeing with the discussion in the article. First, most every organization does a terrible job with the performance review process. We know the litany of complaints, bad implementations, poor […]
“The Boom In Sales Technology”
I suppose it’s normal to see the flood of articles, prospecting emails, calls and such on “sales technology.” Dreamforce is over, we all have visions of our technology based futures dancing in our heads. We see the MarTech and other charts, with 1000’s of suppliers, in unimaginable niches, giving us the most essential sales and marketing technologies, guaranteed to drive performance and customer engagement. We all talk about the future of AI/ML enabled marketing and sales. Seeing a bright future of effortless customer engagement, sales performance, and sky rocketing productivity. We know the future of sales and marketing, and it […]
Designing “Good Days”
Long time followers will know that I’m obsessed with the concept of micro-improvements. The concept of getting 1% better each day, leads to huge gains over the year. I’ve reviewed my process on micro improvements in past posts. I sit down at the end of each day and assess myself against roughly 20 questions, for example, “Did I express gratitude to people, Did I do something to create value for my clients.” The process has been very helpful, both in getting me to be more reflective of what I do/accomplish and in making me more purposeful. But I lapse every […]
It’s Account Planning Season, Again
Account planning is important, it’s fundamental to growing our value and positioning with our key customers. It helps us align resources and activities with the customers that represent the most potential and opportunity. We are approaching the end of the year, everyone is involved in “account planning.” It’s odd, but virtually every organization does the same thing. It seems that account planning is an annual or semi-annual exercise. We dust off last year’s PowerPoint. We update the data in the account plan, showing the customer financial and business performance, discussing their industry positioning and performance, discussing their strategies and priorities. […]