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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
Don’t Sell Where You Lose!
“Well duuuhhh, Dave, thanks for that great insight!” As obvious as it sounds, one of the fastest ways to improve organizational or individual performance is to stop trying to sell where you lose. Yet, as obvious as it sounds, too many of the behaviors I see are focused exactly on that–selling where we lose. The problem is, too often we blindly chase after bad deals. Prospects ask for information, and the sales person is immediately forecasting it as a close. We blindly dial, making dozens of calls every day, desperately trying to find deals. If a prospect fogs a mirror, […]
Insight, Clarity, Execution
We all struggle to change, to do new things, to grow, to implement new strategies, initiatives, and programs. Too often, we and our customers fall short. We don’t quite achieve the goal, we change midstream, we abandon what we were seeking to achieve, pursuing something completely different. Sometimes, change is more difficult than we anticipated. Surprises emerge, we forgot to consider certain things, circumstances change. We have greater problems aligning everyone around the change initiative and move forward. It’s inevitable that many change initiatives lose steam, not for lack of enthusiasm or even commitment, but we just lose our way. It’s not for lack […]
Thinking Of Others, Water Changes Everything!
We’re entering a New Year, many glad to have the past behind us, filled with energy and optimism for the New Year! Most everyone reading this post has been blessed with great fortune. We don’t have to worry about basic things. We have a place to live, we have friends and colleagues, we have food, access to healthcare, and water. We tend to take those for granted, focusing on other things. We don’t have to worry about surviving–living. Yet millions of people have to worry about that every day–surviving. Millions don’t have access to the most basic requirement for survival—potable water. Over […]
Putting Ideas Into Practice!
It’s that time of year. For many organizations, it’s the finish of the old year and the start of a new one. It’s a time when we put so much behind us, developing plans for a new and better year. New goals, new programs, new initiatives, new systems and tools, maybe some new products. It’s a great time, not only for organizations, but for each of us as professionals, to reflect and think about change. What worked in the past 12 months, what didn’t? What skills should we develop to stay at the front of our profession and to more effectively serve […]
Insight, Influence, Value Creation, Trust……
In simplifying our communications, we tend to isolate topics. It’s easier to talk about Constructing Insight just by focusing on that. Or likewise for Influence, Trust, and any number of topics on increasing our ability to connect with our customers. In reality, we can’t isolate these topics, none stands alone, each is required, each strengthens the other. We seek to influence our customers’ decisions, getting them to choose to change and to choose us their partner in moving forward. We’ve seen our efforts to influence and persuade others fail when we push or pitch our solutions. Or we are trying […]
Win/Loss Reviews
Win/Loss reviews are critical to continuous improvement. Do you conduct them? Amazingly, for as much effort as we put into winning or losing a deal, I see too many organizations being very casual about analyzing actual performance and outcomes. I seldom see win reviews conducted. Sometimes I see loss reviews conducted–but most often, it’s not a loss review, it’s a reason code in a CRM system–and most of the time it is price or a product reason. Sometimes I see managers conducting loss reviews, less to learn from what happened, but more to beat up a sales person with, “How […]