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
When Performance Problems Aren’t Obvious—Yet!
Preface: This is much longer than my usual posts, but this is such an important issue–and success tends to hide it. I was talking with a CEO recently. Her company was hitting plan. Customer retention was solid. The team seemed engaged. By every measure that matters, things were working. “So what’s the problem?” I asked. She paused. “I don’t know exactly. I just have this feeling we’re leaving a lot on the table. But I can’t prove it. And when I raise it, people look at me like I’m crazy. We’re making our numbers.” This is the hardest kind of […]
Why Benchmarking Fails
Benchmarking other organizations, identifying best practices has been a cornerstone of business strategy for decades. It gives us the opportunity to study how others get things done, to learn, and to adapt what we’ve learned into our own organizations. We benchmark our competitors, their strategies, and products. Or we look at the very high performing companies, the ones scaling outrageously. We study their GTM strategies, their org structures, their programs, and metrics. We put the same things in place for our own organizations. When we’re considering a new tool, technology, or training program, we typically benchmark it. Vendors point us […]
Protect Your Focus!
Tobia La Marca said something fascinating a few weeks ago (he says a lot of fascinating things). A sentence stood out: “Protect Your Focus.” It’s particularly ironic that at this moment, I’m jumping between writing this article, looking at an email that just arrived, thinking about a meeting in an hour, and seeing alerts creeping up on LinkedIn. We all suffer from this inability to focus. Our devices and apps create massive distractions. And our own minds cause us to drift from topic to topic. In these distractions, we feel as though we are accomplishing things. We clear our emails […]
Customer Service Or Lip Service?
We know, or at least I thought we did, the importance of customer service and their experience. It’s critical in so many ways. Go to company’s website. All of them proclaim, “the customer is first, customer experience is our number one priority, we are here to serve our customers, we value our relationships with our customers….” But when something happens, do they live up to their claims? Or is it just Lip Service? Over the years, I’ve seen customer service and my experience plummet. And it’s not just me, virtually everyone I speak with echoes this view. One would think […]
The Power Of “Thank You!’
Last night, I was sitting in the living room, reading. The phone rang, no caller ID, but it was from an area I recognized, so I answered. It was Bill, an old friend and colleague. As we spoke, Bill said, “We first met about 35 years ago….” Bill was a product marketing guy in a company where I was CRO. He was one of the best product marketing people I’d ever met, deeply involved with customers and our sales teams. We had lots of discussions and occasional disagreements. I went on to form Partners In EXCELLENCE; Bill moved on to […]
CUSP, Leading by Serving, When Outcomes Matter Most
One of the biggest influences in my thinking and in writing Is “Good Enough” Good Enough, Mindsets and Behaviors for Sales Excellence is my good friend Mitch Little. In some ways, we are “brothers from separate mothers,” though he is far better at golf and photography than I am. Mitch just came out with a brilliant new book, based on his experiences in developing one of the highest performing sales organizations I have ever worked with. It’s called CUSP, Leading By Serving, When Outcomes Matter Most. Mitch, because he is wired to care and serve is offering this book in […]