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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
Proving Math Works, Flawed Coaching Arguments
There seem to be no end of articles on who and how managers should invest their time in coaching. Recently, I read another, with lots of people piling on with their opinions and proving it with numbers. As is usual, most of these discussions that prove little more than math works. Many of the arguments go something like this: “Assume an A player is doing $250K, a B player is doing $150K. If we raise the performance of each by 10%, clearly the incremental $25K from the A player far exceeds the increment of $15K from the B player.” With […]
How Many Times Are We Going To Have This Discussion?
Sales is an interesting function, we seem to be caught in a perpetual “deja vu” or one of those scenes in the movie “Ground Hog Day.” Having been involved in professional selling for most of my career, I’m at the point where I hear the same conversations all over again, and again, and again. You know the conversations I’m talking about: We have to stop pitching, start listening….. We have to be customer focused…… We have to be account focused….. We have to create value and provide insight…… We have to focus on our customers’ problems and provide insights…. We […]
New Ideas Don’t Have To Be “New”
We constantly struggle with innovation and insight, whether it’s for our own organization or our work with customers. To be honest, I think we make innovation and insight far too complicated. I don’t know how many “innovation” session I see organizations conducting. Usually, it’s a group of people sitting in a circle. Perhaps they are surrounded by white boards, there are pads of different color “Post-Its.” There may be a facilitator taking the group through a number of “mind-freeing” exercises. Inevitably, they struggle. The groups stare at each other, toss out some ideas, but struggle with really new ideas. Likewise, […]
Stop Reading (Just) Sales Books!
Reading is important to our professional development and growth (not to mention the scientific evidence of how it improves our cognitive capabilities). Far too few business and sales professional actively read as part of their personal and professional growth. (Perhaps, that’s part of the reason we consistently see the stunningly poor data on results.) Every week, however, it’s gratifying to talk to sales people and executives who’ve made reading part of their daily professional development. It’s not just blogs or trade magazines, they are actively reading books, doing deep dives into their own professional development. I love learning what they […]
The Power Of “Yes, And…” In Coaching
Too few managers actively coach. CSO Insights Data indicates the majority of manager spend less than 2 hours a week coaching—total! Too often, what managers consider as coaching is actually very destructive. It’s manifested in several ways: The manager is constantly in tell mode. The manager thinks he knows the situation better than the salesperson, rather than listening, understanding, and exploring; the manager starts telling. They dictate actions the sales person should take. “Go do this, then do that, then try this, and get back to me so I can tell you what to do next. Each of us knows […]
Effectiveness And Efficiency Are Not Natural, But They Are Learnable
Every organization continues to focus on how to drive the highest levels of performance. Broadly, there are two primary areas that drive performance: Effectiveness And Efficiency. Effectiveness focuses on “Are we doing the right things with the right people at the right time?” A lot of sales training focuses on improving our effectiveness. For example, are we engaging our customers in a way that’s relevant and impactful? Are we chasing the right opportunities, qualifying them, executing our sales process well, are we maximizing our impact in each interaction with the customer, are we maximizing our share of account, are we […]