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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
Exceptional Pattern Recognition
I wrote Obsessive Learning/Relentless Execution as a start of a series on what sets the very best performers apart from everyone else. Periodically, I’ll be adding more articles, as well as video interviews of some of these people (so you can see what makes them tick.) Amy Chang, CEO of Accompany**, is one of those exceptional performers. On reading the article, she sent me a comment describing much of what connects the learning–execution pieces. She described it as Exceptional Pattern Recognition. It’s an exceptional talent we see in the very top performers in any field. They look at the same […]
Slow Down, You Move Too Fast
No, I’m not channeling Simon And Garfunkel’s Feeling Groovy I’m talking about your first 30 days as a new sales manager. It’s human nature, particularly if you are in sales and very action oriented, to start doing things. We feel compelled to take action, to start solving problems, to get things going—-after all, it’s that proclivity to take action that probably contributed to you getting the job in the first place. Sometimes, we feel we have to make a mark, to set a tone of some sort. Often, when we are hired as a new manager in a new/different company, we […]
How Strongly Do You Believe In Your People?
Do you believe in your people? Do you believe in them, perhaps more strongly than they believe in themselves? If you don’t believe more strongly than they do, you will never be able to maximize their performance or fulfill their potential. At most, you’ll get some improvement, but probably not sustainable improvement. Our jobs as leaders are to get our people to perform at the highest levels possible, fulfilling both their short and long term potential. Sometimes, I think it’s this absence of belief that impacts our effectiveness as leaders and coaches. If we are asking our people to change, […]
Product Sales Strategy In One Slide
For a quick weekend thought provoking piece, I thought you might be interested in this slide from Peter Thiel. This one slide encompasses so much of what we need to know about product introduction strategies, general sales and growth strategies. It’s particularly interesting when one hears so many discussions from SaaS companies that “No Sales People Are Needed!” What do you think? @pmarca Peter Thiel nailed the reality of the relationship between sales and product in CS 183: pic.twitter.com/cQlF6xrwV5 — sean rose (@sean_a_rose) February 8, 2015
Ditching The Performance Review
I was astounded to read “Let’s Kill The Performance Review” by Liz Ryan. I agree with many of the things she states. The majority of performance review/performance management systems in companies are broken–or at least dysfunctional. It consumes too much unproductive time, with unclear benefit. It’s not a necessary process for compensation management (though I do like compensation tied to performance.) Performance plans as a protection against legal action isn’t really a good defense. And while she doesn’t say it, most managers are poorly trained at setting performance expectations, coaching to them and evaluating performance. But a recommendation to kill […]
Establishing Credibility
In prospecting, one of the most important and difficult things to do is establishing credibility. But without this, moving forward, trying to get any type of engagement is impossible. Too often, sales people are oblivious to this—this applies to the really bad sales people who don’t deserve to be selling. Or they do a really poor job establishing credibility, this applies mostly to mediocre sales people. The challenge is, how do we establish credibility-or at least enough to get the customer to respond? The classic mistake sales people make in thinking about establishing credibility, is “We have to talk about […]