Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
To Challenge Or Not To Challenge
Every once in a while, someone asks me, “When is it right to challenge?” At first the question bothered me, my knee jerk reaction was, “We should be challenging our customers 100% of the time.” Then I realized may have been answering a question that is different than what the person is asking. Even though Challenger was published years ago, there remains a lot of misunderstanding around the concept Challenging. Many tend to think of it as a behavioral style–perhaps slightly aggressive, perhaps confrontive. When you look Challenger up in the dictionary, there are phrases, “someone who disputes something, or […]
Are You Designing For Performance?
Over the past several weeks, I’ve been writing articles related to designing our organizations for performance. Whether it’s talent management,rethinking the bell curve, metrics and shifting the numbers in our favor, or rethinking the pareto principle–we can and are obligated to design our organizations for performance. It’s a simple concept, but too often, it seems we design for mediocrity. Perhaps not consciously–I don’t think anyone purposefully designs for mediocrity, but we achieve it through lack of attention, acceptance, poor strategy, bad execution, lack of discipline, and making excuses. We tend to forget, we are in control of our own personal […]
The Seduction Of The Pareto Principle
All of us know, often talk about the Pareto Principle. It’s the 80/20 “rule.” an observation we apply to lots of different things. For example, 20% of our sales people produce 80% of the results. Much of the “data” suggests this is conservative, that far few sales people produce a larger percentage of the results. Often, though, I think we misunderstand this. We tend to treat the Pareto Principle as a law of nature of physics, thinking it is what it is. We feel happy, when we beat it by a little, maybe 30% of our people producing 80% of […]
Math Works, Always-How Do We Tilt The Numbers In Our Favor
In sales and marketing, we at least claim to be very numbers oriented. We have metrics around everything: Click-throughs Bounces Open rates Time spent on a page MQL, SQL, SAL Daily/weekly dials Daily/weekly conversations/meetings Demos Pipeline Coverage Win Rates Average Deal/Transaction Value Sales Cycle Time Lifetime Customer Value Renewal Rates ….. I could go on. There seem to be no end to the metrics we can impose on what we do. There’s a great discussion about whether we are measuring the right things–but that’s the topic of another blog post. Metrics and the goals we establish are critical. They give […]
Should Marketing Be Measured On Revenue?
As a disclaimer, I’m a “sales guy,” and may misunderstand marketing. But I often see discussions about marketing needs to be measured on revenue. I think revenue might be a component of a marketing metric, but I wonder as we aren’t focusing too narrowly on a metric. losing sight of the bigger picture. (Much of what I talk about in this post can equally be applied to sales focusing purely on revenue.) Every function in the organization is accountable for developing and executing strategies and plans that are consistent with the overall corporation’s strategies, plans, and priorities. Clearly, revenue and […]
Digital Wastelands
The digital/social landscape looks increasingly bleak. Channel after channel is becoming a vast wasteland of garbage. As Gerhard Gschwandtner suggests, the channels are increasingly being filled with Digital Graffiti. Looking at the landscape broadly: I get 100’s of emails a day, these are the “legitimate” emails. I get added to every list, I’m OK with periodic emails, summaries, from many of the organizations, it’s an easy way to keep up, but somehow, they think there is new news and I should be interested in hearing from them every day, even though 90% of it is meaningless, and if they were […]