Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Are You Credible?
Credibility is critical to our ability to engage people, incite them to think differently, and drive change. Regardless of our role, credibility is critical. Whether with our customers, our business partners, our people, peers, our managers, our communities. If we have no credibility with our intended audience, we can achieve nothing. We seek to be credible because it is an important element of trust and our ability to influence others. Too often, we focus on “symbols” of credibility, rather than being credible. It may be our job title, the company we work for, the companies we have worked for, our […]
Call Prep, Doing The Work!
It seems in virtually every professional endeavor that the prep work is as important, sometimes, more important than the actual work itself. The singular exception seems to be selling, we seem to have a predilection for one of two things–winging it or sticking to the script. Every professional athlete prepares for the event. It’s not just the normal practice, running plays, practicing serves, working out. They study their opponents. They want to learn everything they can–their strengths/weaknesses, how they respond, how they think. Doctors are the same, despite the hundreds of times they may have done a procedure, they study […]
We Just Need To Make More Customer Calls!
Universally, we hear, “We just need to be talking to more customers!” More seems to be the universal answer to all sales problems. At the same time, customers are not responding to our outreach. We need more emails, more dials, more LinkedIn InMails, more of everything to produce the same volumes we achieved only a year ago. We spend millions on tools to free up sales person time, automating the processes. We analyze each word they say, tuning the scripts based on what the analytics are saying. We now know we can only ask 4 questions and must swear–so we […]
Should Sellers Respond To Personalized Cold Emails “Out Of Respect?”
99% of the cold emails I get are personalized. Usually, it’s David, though only my mother calls me David, most people, unless they are angry call me Dave. I’m most commonly called “You Jerk!!” Sometimes it says my company name, “Excellenc.” That’s not a mispelling, look at my email, but they still haven’t done their homework. The company’s actual name is Partners In EXCELLENCE. A large number of those personalized emails are actually right, addressed to Dave or David, only close friends say “You Jerk,” they actually know me. And these emails refer to my company name correctly. Of the […]
Quick Fixes….
Not long ago, a small group of us were out on our road bikes. One biker hit something on the road, and went down. He broke his wrist trying to brace himself (in addition to scraping himself up pretty badly). We called an ambulance, the paramedics acted quickly. They examined him. They checked to see if anything else was broken, if he was bleeding. They asked him questions like, “What day of the week is it, what’s your name, where are you right now,” checking to see if he might have hit his head, suffering some sort of brain damage. […]
Productive Disagreement
Wherever we turn, it seems we are becoming increasingly disagreeable and polarized. Whether socially, politically, or in our businesses, we struggle with disagreement. But there are a lot of problems with disagreement–or at least our ability to understand and manage disagreements, productively. If we learned how to deal with disagreement, productively, disagreement provides huge opportunities to learn, improve, grow, and achieve. Disagreement can be very threatening. It raises our stress levels, disagreement makes us uncomfortable. Since disagreement can be so threatening, too often we display avoidance behaviors. Rather than address important issues and trying to resolve them, we avoid them. […]