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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 Shouldn’t Be Surprised By “Quiet Quitting”
“Quiet quitting” isn’t so quiet anymore. It, also, isn’t that new. We’ve seen and, too often, ignored the signs of this phenomena for years. All we have to do is look at data on employee engagement, tenure/attrition, employee satisfaction. Organizational leadership has been laying the groundwork for quiet quitting, ignoring the signals around this phenomena for years. For years, in selling, we’ve done everything we can to mechanize the process. People are treated as interchangeable widgets, if they don’t meet our goals, if they don’t make the number of dials, hit their activity numbers, strictly comply with what we are […]
The Secret Formula For Prospecting…..
The other day, I wrote one of my LinkedIn whining posts. I was, once again, whining about how poorly people prospect. As usual, it generated a lot of conversation about how widespread truly ineffective prospecting is. But my friend, Mike Webster, provided a very provocative question: “Well, David, I will bite. How, in general terms, should the companies who might have something to sell you and your team go about researching your current needs? Thanks.” In responding to Mike’s question, I made the point, “I have no problem providing people the formula that will guarantee a response from me. I […]
Pipelines, A Tutorial
Recently, a reader wrote, asking a lot of questions about pipelines–what are they, why are they important, how do we leverage them, and so forth. At first, I was surprised by the question, I think of this as basic and fundamental to selling. As I reflected, I realized this is a bad assumption. For example, I know of very few sales training programs that teach pipeline concepts (we’ve been doing this for the past 30 years). Second, when I look at most sales pipelines, they are a disaster. Pipelines are there, but opportunities are in the wrong stages, close dates […]
Silly Me, I Thought It Is All About The Customer…..
A good friend reminded me of something I have gotten wrong. I was complaining about the mind numbing volume and stupidity of the marketing messages I get. My inbox is filled with emails with people pitching their products and services. I get at least a dozen voicemails, every day, promoting some sort of product we absolutely must have. Most are about products and services that are not applicable to our business—we don’t manufacture anything, so I’m really not interested in supply chain management solutions. We only have 15 people, so our HR needs are very easy. Even those that are […]
Do Your Sellers Have A Future?
Too many leaders seem to have given up. They take high attrition rates/turnover as “the way things are.” They manage strategies around low tenure (11 months for sellers and leaders). Low engagement, the great resignation, quiet quitting are now business constants that leaders have to manage around. Some give excuses, “Well GenZ is like that, they are very mobile and won’t stay with any organization very long…..” But then we see the same issue with every other generation. Too many have given up. At the same time, I seldom hear leaders talking about the implications of this. It represents millions […]
Customer “Systems”
I wrote about how our organizations are sets of interrelated/interdependent subsystems, aggregated to the enterprise system. In that, I shared a perspective about human nature. How, while being well intended, we tend to focus on our jobs/functions, often doing things that inadvertently adversely impacting other parts of the organization. We, also, tend to focus so deeply on optimizing what we do, that we may not understand distant parts of the organization and how our work impacts them. As a refresher, that post is “The foot bone connected to the leg bone…..” Our customers face the same challenges! Like all of […]