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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
We Misunderstand Lean—But It Is So Important!
I was having a conversation about the “state of sales” with some colleagues recently, some of the smartest people I know in looking at sales performance. I asked them, “How are you seeing sales organizations leverage Lean concepts?” The reaction was quick, “Oh you’re talking about eliminating waste……” It’s a natural reaction but a real misunderstanding of Lean and Agile methods. Sure, in Lean we eliminate waste–it’s important, but that’s not the value of lean. And I think this misunderstanding, is why so few sales and marketing organizations don’t understand the power of Lean. Lean has huge traction in about every […]
Sales Role Agility
It’s human nature to categorize things and people. It enables us to build models and constructs. It enables us to more easily deal with ambiguity, abstractions, and other things. Somehow things seem easier and clearer when everything has a box and everything is in its box. We characterize and categorize sales people–putting the different types into boxes–hunters/farmers, lone wolves, consultative, connectors, challengers, relationship builders, conductors, builders, transactors, and so forth. Each has it’s own characteristics. Depending on the fashion of the times, or one’s biases, one is perceived as better than the other. Need to acquire new customers, an executive will […]
Who Cares About Big Data, Where Are The Big Questions?
This morning, I’m sitting in a series of presentations extolling the value of big data. I get it–kind of. I get that more data has been created in the past 2 years than in the history of mankind. I get that data is everywhere, we can know so much about so many different things. I get there are very powerful tools, enabling us to gather disparate types of data from thousands of sources, slicing and dicing it in ways previously unimaginable. I think if I hear one more statistic, hear any more testimonials about the power of big data, I’ll throw […]
Sales Operations, Serving Sales People—An Interview With Tony Walker
Over the next several months, I’ll be interviewing a number of Sales Operations and Sales Enablement executives. I believe these roles are critical in understanding and driving sales performance. Field sales managers focus on their teams. They want to maximize the performance of each person on the team and of the team, as a whole. They focus on the numbers–is the team performing at a level to achieve their numbers? Sales Operations and Sales Enablement executives view the organization through a different lens. They have the opportunity to look at the sales organization as a whole. They look at all […]
DumbingThings Down Versus Radical Simplification
I’m a great advocate of Radical Simplification. Our worlds are too complex, we seem to keep piling things onto everything we’ve done in the past. New programs, new processes, new systems, new tools, new training. Layer upon layer accumulates, confusing sales people–what do I do? Which strategy should I follow, do I use this approach or another? It goes on and on…… Too often, however, in response to this complexity and all the “tools” that have been put in place to manage complexity, instead of simplification, we dumb things down. We make it so we don’t have to think, analyze, […]
Buying Is A High Risk Job!
In my post, “Solving Our Problems,” Tim Foster reminded me of something the folks at The TAS Group say, “The impact on the customer of a bad buying decision is usually greater than the impact of the lost sale to the sales person.” It’s something few of us think about, but we need to remind ourselves everyday. The risk to the customer in making a bad buying decision can be very high. The risks far exceed what they pay for the product and the revenue we might get. To the customer it might mean: A project failure. The customer is […]