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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
What’s With All These F#!@&*g Reviews!!! Stop Wasting My Time!
It seems managers are always asking for and conducting reviews. Sales people complain, sometimes fairly, about managers “micromanaging,” and wasting time. Some managers seem to take refuge in staring at reports and doing reviews. A lot of managers, if they were honest, probably don’t know why they are conducting a review. “It’s something we’ve always done, my boss is asking me to do them, ……” Too often, managers seem to be simply “checking the box,” saying they have done it, but not creating great value for sales people, themselves, or their management. A lot of time seems to be wasted […]
Children Are Not Pawns!
Children are not pawns to be used to achieve a political agenda! I am ashamed to see children held hostage in detention centers as means to force decisions on securing our nation’s boarders. While the administration is leveraging the detention of infants and children to achieve “strategic goals, ” the end does not justify the means, it never has. This is not a political issue, it is a humanitarian issue. We, as individuals, citizens, and a nation must have higher standards. We are better than this. We cannot standby, taking no action, we must make our anger and voices heard. […]
Abandoning Excellence
Sometimes, I reflect on the “good old days.” Things were certainly different, I do think at a macro level things are far better than whatever our image of the good old days were. At the same time, I do see areas where we seem to be “settling” for levels of performance or excellence that are far lower than what we expected as standards of performance years. By way of illustration, I’ve spent much of my career loosely involved with telecommunications, whether the operating companies, equipment, or services providers. In the good old days of landlines, there was something that all […]
Features And Benefits
Somehow, we think features and benefits are important. Every beginning sales course talks about how we present Features And Benefits (When I first started, I learned how to present Features-Advantages-Benefits —-FABs). Our product marketing and marketing teams load us up with content and presentations with endless lists of features and benefits. Visit any web site, and one is inundated with features and benefits. We see the comparative tables showing features and benefits on one axis and the comparison of our solution with various alternatives–and we know our solution always checks off all the boxes, the alternatives don’t. Ironically, when you […]
What If Sales Enablement Is A “Rotational Assignment?”
I always hate starting a post with a pile of disclaimers. In some of my recent posts, I seem to be bashing sales enablement. I don’t mean to be doing that. Sales enablement is a vital function in organizations, it has a hugely important mission that can only be fulfilled with talented professionals. Many of our best clients and my closest friends are sales enablement professionals (And I hope they remain so after reading this post.) However, I often wonder if we might increase the impact of sales enablement by making it a “temp job” or “rotational assignment.” What if […]
Sales Enablement, “Build It And They Will Come….”
Sales enablement is a “hot” issue in driving sales effectiveness/performance. Hundreds of millions are being invested in “enabling sales people.” Whether it’s new software tools, programs, content, training, processes, dedicated sales enablement professionals and executives are creating and delivering an endless array of things to “help” sales people. Every sales enablement professional I meet is very dedicated and well intended. But often, it seems too many have lost sight of the goal–it;s helping our sales people sell more. Too often, it seems these professionals get caught up in their own activities, which become ends in themselves, but may not be […]