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
Moving From Selling As An Art To Selling As A Science
We seem to be approaching or passing the tipping point where leading sales practitioners view successful selling as a disciplined, focused, engineered approach to engaging and creating value for customers. Stated differently, moving more toward selling as a science. I hope the days of the sales person being the most gregarious person, always quick with a joke or story, slapping people on the back, are long past. I hope we no longer live by the mantra, “When the going gets tough, the tough take a customer to lunch/golf.” But, as with many swings of the pendulum, I worry that the […]
What’s The Difference Between “A” Players And Others? It’s All In The Details
I was having a conversation with a colleague about the differences between top performers and everyone else. The conversation caused me to reflect on discussions I’ve had with 1000’s of sales people over the past year. Clearly, there are differences in sales people and their approaches. The skills and competencies vary by market/industry, customer base, solutions, organizational strategies/priorities, geography/culture and many other things. Various assessments will tell you there are commonalities in top performers in certain behaviors, attitudes. For example, the ability to take rejection, money motivation, risk tolerance, and so forth. We see certain commonalities in those indicators across […]
If A “Fool With A Tool Is Still A Fool,” Why Do We Keep Giving Them Tools?
A colleague specializing in sales and marketing automation tools is fond of saying, “A fool with a tool is still a fool.” My variation of this is that often tools enable us to “Create crap at the speed of light.” Tools have a wonderful way of amplifying our capabilities. We can not only drive greater velocity, but also far greater volume and reach. In the hands of fools, tools enable us to not only execute poorly at very high velocity, but to spread the pain of that poor execution across a much broader range of victims, I mean prospects/customers. With […]
The Importance Of Small Changes In Improving Performance
Too often we think of performance and continuous improvement incorrectly. While we and our managers (who are trying to coach us) may be well intended and highly motivated, we set ourselves up for failure from the outset. One of the problems is we try to change too much. It’s kind of like some bad coaching I got on my golf swing. Rather than going to a professional and paying for coaching, I asked a friend who had a very low handicap advice me on my swing. He watched me at the driving range, then said, “Dave you have to do […]
What If We Start Designing Our Organizations For “A Players” Only?
All of us, me included, tend to think of our organizations as mixes of A, B, C players. Implicitly, we tend to believe that’s the way things are. We settle into routines about how we coach and improve each, at best, shifting the bell curve (or normal distribution curve) a little to the right. All the time wringing our hands about how we improve performance. But what would happen if we start designing our organizations to have only A players, or those that will become A players in a reasonable period of time? Why should we accept the idea that […]
We Don’t Drive Performance By “Grading On The Curve”
Recently, I wrote, “Behind Ever C Player, There’s A…….” One of my most astute readers made the comment, “If you rank on a curve, you have to have C players, who may also be great.” Mike is absolutely right, kind of…… With his permission, I’m going to tweak his comment a little beyond what he intended, but I think it’s an important discussion and distinction. Too often, we “grade on the curve.” We have a mentality around comparing performance of each person to the others on the team. There are some merits to this, however there are some flaws–which lead […]