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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
Sales Heroics Are Actually Sales Failures!
All of us revel in stories of the deal where we took dramatic actions and ultimately won–hopefully not by discounting. We get an Adrenalin rush in talking about this things that we did to pull the opportunity from the ashes and into the victory column. When we get together with our colleagues, over beer, we seek to outdo each other in stories about our heroics. I’d be less than honest, if I didn’t admit to doing the same. These stories are fun, we enjoy sharing them and laughing. But the reality is that sales heroics represent a failure on our […]
Beware Of “Experts” Sharing Data…..
I guess part of being perceived as being an expert is sharing data and research—all of which supports the conclusions you want people to reach. Don’t get me wrong, we share data on the results we’ve produced, we share data on research we have conducted. But we are careful to position the context of that data and how it might be interpreted. But too often, we consciously or unconsciously, we “lie with statistics.” I read an interesting article in Forbes. Largely, I agree with the author, but he cited an example that is very misleading. I’m certain there was no […]
Sales Manager, Are You Doing Your Job?
Monthly, I get into discussions with well intended sales managers–all are struggling, all are looking for help. They are trying to do their jobs, but in most cases they don’t understand their jobs, so it’s no wonder they are struggling. Conversations go something like the conversation I had several weeks ago with “Bob.” Bob is a front line sales manager (FLSM) for a large technology company. He has had a successful sales career and has been a FLSM for several years. He’s making his numbers, but barely, he laugh’s, saying, “It’s always at 11:59 PM on the last day of […]
Thoughts On Agility
Agile is one of the “hot” business buzzwords these days, right along with digital, transformation, and disruptive. (You get double buzzword bingo points if you can use, “disruptive, agile, digital business transformation” in a single sentence on a PowerPoint slide.) But much of what I see under the “agile” banner is far from agile. The concept of agility focuses on improving individual and organizational ability to respond to quickly changing business conditions. Whether they are market shifts, competitive disruption, dealing with overwhelm and complexity (Internal, customer, market), being “agile” helps us both recognize these and take action to respond. Alternatively, […]
Valuing Time–Your Customers’ And Yours
Time is the only non-recoverable thing that each of us controls. We waste it, it’s forever lost. We waste our customers’/prospects’ time, we’ve cheated them out of their most precious commodity. We let our customers/prospects waste ours–we’ve enabled them to de-value us and what we can do to help them. Ironically, we seem to treat time in quite the opposite way. We act as though time is a renewable resource. We don’t take the time to plan/prepare, but we always find the time to do the rework or recover what we should have done. We over schedule, don’t schedule, wander […]
What You’ve Always Been Doing Won’t Get You Where You Want To Be.
I do dozens of business reviews with all sorts of organizations, globally. Many are struggling, they aren’t hitting their numbers–at least consistently. Or their markets/customers are changing, or their competitors are changing. They are all well intended, but too often, they are approaching these challenges in the wrong way. Most of the time, they are committed to continuing to do things, they’ve always done–except just more. They ramp up pressure on the sales people. They arbitrarily increase pressure on activities. Make more calls, send more emails, have more meetings, find more deals. They may up pipeline coverage metrics–rather that 3 […]