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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
Connecting The Dots, Strategy And Execution
I’m sure I’m trying the patience of a number of people in a client organization. We’re establishing the key strategies, priorities, goals/metrics for the coming fiscal year. The CEO is very clear about what he wants to accomplish–though I had to wrestle him down to focusing on the top two. It was a great exercise for he and a few of his top executives. But after some reflection and debate, as well as some reshaping and redefinition of some of their strategies, he was able to identify the top two things, then started identifying the strategies beneath these top 2 […]
Skilled Adaptation Or Clueless Reactions?
To the casual observer, the fluidity with which a top performer adapts to a challenge may be hard to distinguish from the clueless reactions of poor performers. Both seem to be “rolling with the punches.” As the customer shifts, both the top performer and the clueless performer shift–but in very different, often subtle ways. The clueless performer simply reacts. The customer does something, the clueless performer reacts and responds. This may provoke other actions from the customer, to which the clueless performer responds. This back and forth process continues until the customer is bored and tells the clueless performer to […]
Change Sucks!
Change sucks, particularly when it’s inflicted on us. Often, don’t understand what’s going on, why, what it means to what we should be doing. We’re asked to do new things, sometimes things we don’t know how to do, sometimes things we don’t like to do or want to do. The natural tendency is to resist. To go back to what you were comfortable with doing in the past. To complain to management and complain about management. Sometimes, we think, “This too will pass,” so we ignore things, keep our heads down, do what we always did, and hope we can […]
What’s The Customer Doing During The “57%” And Why Sales Should Celebrate!
I have to admit I’m getting relatively pissed off with all the discussions around, “Customers don’t want to see sales people until they are 57% (up to 70%) though their buying process.” There are reactions ranging from: Sheer joy: Sales people saying, it’s great, that means they are only focusing on serious buyers, it shortens their sales process, and all sorts of other nonsense. Sheer relief: Again sales people saying, all that front end stuff is the really tough stuff. We don’t have to prospect, find, qualify, do need/requirements discovery. It’s all marketing’s job to provide the content that gets […]
Committed To “Not Succeeding?”
I don’t know anyone committed to failure. Just the idea of it, sets one on edge. Being accused of being “committed to failure,” is offensive. But not being committed to failure doesn’t mean we are committed to success. If we were totally committed to success, we would do those things are proven to make us successful. And we would do them all the time. We know–or should know, that customers don’t want to be pitched about our products. They don’t care about our products, they care about their own businesses, goal attainment, their own business and personal success. So if […]
Starting With The End In Mind
I learn so much when I spend time with project managers. It may be the manager of a product development team that needs to get a critical product launched by a certain date. Or someone building a new factory, needing to get it into production by a certain date. When I was a kid, I watched my father a lot. He was responsible for developing and managing “giga-projects,” like a new transit system for a city, new airports, harbors, power plants, and so forth. These projects involved coordinating thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of activities, billions in investment. The […]