Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Social Media Isn’t So Social
Whatever we call it: Social Media, Social Selling, Social Networking, Social Business; to often it’s just not very Social. There’s a huge race for companies and individuals to stake out their “turf” in the electronic wastelands and cloud networks. We are inundated with emails, texts, articles, newsletters, connection requests, horrendous prospecting attempts, mind numbing tweets all focused on one set of communications. The turf war is about building visibility, followers, likes, dislikes, endorsements and so forth. We race to build volume over quality, noise over thoughtful discussion. Too often, we leverage these social and new electronic platforms to talk about […]
Teamwork And Collaboration Is All BS!
My friend, Mike Weinberg, has gotten all in a lather about whether we hire Team Players Or Top Producers. His post is really good, I tend to agree with him, but have a slightly different perspective. We tend to casually toss around ideas of “good team players,” we need to “collaborate,” we need to “partner.” They are important concepts, but over time they’ve tended to be viewed as ends and not means. And I think that’s what Mike is railing against, and I’m in wild agreement. Teamwork, collaboration, partnering are all meaningless as outcomes. We don’t do these things to […]
How Will You Justify This To Your Management?
Too often, our customers focus on price, consequently we focus on price—after all we want to be responsive to our customers. But there are all sorts of problems our customers have when they focus on price. We tend to worry about it — after all, we want to minimize the amount of discounting we provide. But our customers face huge challenges by just focusing on price. The biggest is, when they have made a decision, they have to go to management for approval. The first question they will be challenged with is, “Why should we spend this money?” Ugh! Here […]
Obsessive Learning, Relentless Execution—The Yin And Yang
My post, “Top Performers, Obsessive Learning, Relentless Execution” has stimulated a lot of discussion on both the blog, LinkedIn, and through email. I thought I’d continue to expand on this topic. There has been some discussion about which is more important–Learning or Execution. It’s an important issue, I think they are inseparable. Stated differently, it’s kind of a Chicken/Egg thing. We see lots of people who focus on one aspect, perhaps Learning. They study and study. They read everything they can. If confronted with a specific problem, they collect data, analyze, collect more data, analyze—-somehow they know a lot, but […]
Understanding The Customer Expectations Critical To Customer Experience
Recently I wrote Responding To Customer Experience Disasters. It’s stimulated some interesting discussion, some deeply personal because of the situation I wrote about. One of the most interesting comments came from my good friend, Tamara Schenk, who tended to think of the situation as an ethical issue–less a business or customer experience issue. I can understand Tamara’s perspective, both she and I were reflecting on things that impacted each of us personally. But I think she raises a very important issue about customer experience and design. Until we put ourselves into the customer’s shoes, until we understand what drives them […]
Responding To Customer Experience Disasters!
As much as we try to develop, implement, and execute outstanding customer experiences, sometimes things fall apart and we have a complete disaster. Everything goes wrong! We all fail. We make mistakes, sometimes we just do the wrong things, sometimes it’s error. In larger organizations, senior executives have to trust that everyone in the organization is executing–but sometimes, despite everything that’s done, it someone in the organization makes a mistake. Maybe they don’t know how to do something, maybe they don’t care, but people will make mistakes and fail. How we respond to these customer service and experience disasters is critical. […]