Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Experience Does(nt) Matter
Experience is an interesting thing. It is, sometimes, very helpful. But, too often it limits us. Experience can be helpful. As we do our work, our past experience in similar situations shapes how we address current situations. We know how to respond to customers that ask certain questions, or when certain things happen, we know certain responses/actions enable us to successfully deal with them. Experience enables us to make sense of the things we encounter and to be able to respond in a way that produces the results and outcomes we want. Without learning from our experiences, it would be […]
Good Revenue And Bad Revenue
It might seem odd, particularly in these difficult economic times, to talk about the concept of “good and bad revenue.” Some of you may be thinking “revenue is revenue, all revenue is good!” What’s the difference between good and bad revenue? Good revenue has the following characteristics: It generates strong profitability because it is from deals that we know how to support well. It is from deals where we know we can delight the customer, helping them achieve their goals, enabling us both to grow future business and creating accounts that are proud to share their delight in working with […]
Why, What, How, Who, When, Where
We see versions of these words in different contexts. If you’ve ever been a journalist, these are the fundamental issues the journalist must address in any story. If you are a Simon Sinek fan, by now you have internalized his principles of “Start with why.” We don’t talk much about these principles in selling or as managers in leading our people/organizations. In looking at sales and engaging our customers, we spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the What and How. We are inundated with training, content, articles, books on “You have to prospect, You have to build your […]
Diversity Is Critical, And Not Just For The Reasons We Think!
This is one of those posts that starts with an apology or a disclaimer. I hesitated writing it, because what I am writing can be so easily misinterpreted, or I may be very naive/poorly informed. (I’m less worried about the latter, I know I need to learn) Diversity is important–it’s critical for our organizations. We need to have diverse organizations across all dimensions: Gender, Race, Orientation, Religion, Nationality, Age and so forth. Diversity is important, not just because it’s the right thing to do. From the privileged white male perspective, we have to give women, people of differing race/ethnic backgrounds, […]
Culture, Values, Visible Leadership
So many of the discussions on sales and business performance focus on strategies, competitive positioning, product/service superiority, and even customer satisfaction/loyalty. As we talk about how we execute at the highest levels, depending on what a pundit is selling, the “secret” to success is the application of certain technologies, methodologies, training, programs, content, tools, processes. In sales, we’ve seen huge infusions of all of these, yet sales performance doesn’t improve, the percent of people achieving quota continues to plummet. More importantly, turnover and attrition is skyrocketing. Average tenure for sales people and managers is down to 16.5 months, and, I […]
Talking About Our Competitors
Not long ago, I read an exchange about how we should talk to our customers about out competitors. Some felt we should take a “leadership” position offering our views and insights to the customer. Frankly, I was appalled with some of the opinions in that discussion. We have no business talking about our competitors products and business. I don’t make that statement around any sort of high-minded position about fair play, it’s simply a no-win discussion for us to conduct. First, we don’t know anything about their products and companies—far too many sales people struggle to understand their own products […]