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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
The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need
What would happen if you locked a leading self help expert and a sales expert in a room, challenging them to write a book? No, I’m not setting you up for a line like, “How many self help gurus does it take to screw in a light bulb,” or “What do you call 100 sales thought leaders sitting at the bottom of the ocean?” I’m actually quite serious. Think of your favorite self help expert. Perhaps Stephen Covey, Tony Robbins, Napoleon Hill, Tim Ferris, James Altucher, or anyone else. Think of some of your favorite sales thought leaders, Dale Carnegie, […]
Are You Hiring A “Good Guy,” Or The Right Individual?
Recently, I met with a CEO. He was trying to hire a new VP of Sales. For various reasons, he had struggled with getting the right person in place for a number of years. He was about to hire an individual. This person was the only individual that had been interviewed. On paper, the candidate looked pretty good. As I sat with the CEO, I asked, “What makes you think this person is the right person?” “He seems like a good guy. He’s had a great track record of success, everyone who’s spoken with him likes him……” responded the CEO. […]
#My First Seven Jobs Katherine Tate and Eric Anderson
There’s a series going around the web about people’s First Seven Jobs. It’s been fun and fascinating to see the very first jobs people held. There’s a diverse selection of people’s first seven jobs here, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, and Keenan. I jumped onto the bandwagon with my first 7 jobs. In the comments, you can also see Hank Barnes‘ first seven. It’s actually a huge amount of fun–first thinking about your own, reflecting on what they meant to you (privately) and seeing others’ experience. Consequently, I’ve invited a huge number of people of diverse backgrounds, ages, and locations, to […]
Reflections On Mediocrity
Often we think of mediocre people or mediocre organizations as those that don’t perform well, at least in comparison to their peers. I hadn’t realized my understanding of mediocrity was wrong. It was actually an interview of comedian Norm MacDonald. The real definition of mediocrity is failing to perform to your full potential. It really struck me, when we fail to perform to our full potential, we are choosing mediocrity. It’s amazing how often I see people, sometimes myself, choosing mediocrity. Most sales people, managers, business professionals I encounter know what they should be doing. We’ve read enough, we’ve been […]
Email Unsubscribe Hell!
We all get too many unwanted and unsolicited emails. Usually, they are pretty easy to handle. If they have used an emailing system–for example those integrated into the common marketing automation tools like Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua, or those in email automation tools like MailChimp, Constant Contact or others; one can easily unsubscribe from these emails and not hear from these companies again. Professional marketers buying lists always scrub those lists against the unsubscribe, so they don’t inadvertently send an emails to someone that has already unsubscribed. If a company isn’t using a marketing or email automation system, the practice, at […]
Systemic Leadership Failure
The Wells Fargo saga is a tragic example of systemic leadership failure. Excuses offered by top leadership continue to provide rich examples of their failures in serving their customers, their people, their communities, and shareholders. Unfortunately, as bad as they are, the current data probably only shows part of the problem. There’s probably data from the last several years that will never be presented, reinforcing the awful leadership model set by Wells Fargo top executives. Too often, blame for performance issues is pushed down the the sales person. We see it in organizations all the time, sales people aren’t performing, […]