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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
Measuring Outcomes Not Activities
We’re proud of the marketing and sales metrics we have in place. I sit in meeting after meeting with people going through endless charts showing their performance across any number of metrics. Too often, however, we see huge disconnects in what the metrics show and the most important performance metrics–revenue/profitability attainment, growth, share, customer satisfaction, customer growth/retention, and so forth. Ultimately these disconnects come from measuring the wrong things. Usually it was from measuring the activities–not the outcomes of those activities. Here are some examples, I’ve seen recently: Everyone in an outbound call center was measured on the number of […]
Goal Alignment–A Performance Roadblock
Too often, I sit in meetings of top executives and it seems each is speaking a different language. Marketing talks about their performance, sales, customer success, product management, engineering, development, finance, manufacturing, HR….. Each has metrics and can go through pages and pages of data showing their performance. Yet when taken together, too often, the organization isn’t meeting their goals. (That’s usually why I’m invited to join these meetings.) Recently, I sat in a conversation between a marketing team and a sales team. Marketing presented tremendous data about web traffic, email hits, SEO results, and so forth–but when the Sales exec […]
Lean Sales: Cause And Effect
x Connect via LinkedIn Subject Message Connect Whether we are in marketing or sales (or anything for that matter), everything that we do creates an effect–or an outcome. Cause/Effect—Action/Reaction—Input/Output It’s a simple concept, perhaps so simple, we tend to ignore it. For example, why would we continue to make hundreds of calls to anyone we can reach, pitching our products with abysmal results? At least if our goal is something other than creating abysmal results? Why would we chase opportunities outside our sweet spot, when we know we have greater success with our ideal customers? Why would we continue the […]
Why Are They Buying—Do They Know?
I’ve written, often, about the importance of understanding why our customers are buying. Too often, we lose this in our headlong rush to pitch our products and get the purchase order. We fail to understand what the customer is trying to achieve, their goals, the opportunities they are trying to address. We don’t know what’s making them dissatisfied with their current operations and driving the need to buy. Clearly we increase our effectiveness and impact when we clearly understand what’s driving the customer and the consequences of doing nothing. But in today’s world of large buying groups and complex decision-making, […]
The Examples We Set, Our People Are Watching
As managers and leaders, we create (consciously or unconsciously) dozens of “training” moments for our people, every day. Our people watch our every move, drawing conclusions about what they should be doing, how they should be behaving, where they should invest their time, and what their priorities are. What we do and how we act become more impactful than what we say. It’s so simple, yet we make so many mistakes: We want our sales people to use the tools and systems we’ve invested in—but we still ask our admins to print out a report, or send us the updated […]
Knowing Versus Doing
There were some interesting comments on my post, Focus On The Customer–Magic Happens! Mike Kunkle wrote that he found it “Amazing that people were amazed.” Michael Harris raised the issue of “Knowing Versus Doing.” These are issues I wrestle with constantly, and which drive great frustration. I think this issue–Knowing Versus Doing–it at the crux of organizational and individual performance excellence. Whether we are looking at sales, marketing, customer service or any type of sustained levels of high performance, more often than not, it seems we know what we should be doing–yet we consistently fail to execute. For my entire […]