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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
Knowing How Things Work, Versus Knowing The Answers
I wrote a post, “Do Sellers Really Understand How Businesses Work.” I wanted to dive more deeply into what this means. In the article, I talked about understanding our customers business strategies, purpose, priorities. I talked about understanding the structure and organization of our customers, learning how they work together to achieve their goals. In other posts I’ve talked about how we apply systems thinking both to better understand our customers businesses, but also to help them improve, change, and grow. Additionally, I talked about how we leverage financial reporting and analyst sessions to better understand our customers, their performance […]
Customers And Sellers, Conflicting Systems
I’ve been writing a series on the importance of systems thinking in buying and selling. A fundamental issue we have to understand is “What happens when two independent systems intersect and have to work together?” As we, sellers, look at the various pieces parts of selling—marketing, sales, customer service, etc—we tend to optimize these systems to achieve our separate goals. We focus on our effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity in generating revenue. Our customers have different systems–most are focused on accomplishing the objectives of their functional organizations and those of their enterprise. There are other “systems,” the way they identify and […]
Work/Life Balance……
We see all sorts of articles about work/life balance. We read about a downside to WFH, the fact that we seem never to leave the job, it intrudes on our home life. We see people putting in long hours and macho attitudes that some how associate hours at work with one’s value. We see people genuinely exhausted from long hours. We see quiet quitting, both associated with hours and with a lack of connectedness with the organization. We have a very real problem. Part of it is organizational and driven by leadership creating workplaces that don’t value people, that don’t […]
“The Foot Bone Connected To The Leg Bone, The Leg Bone Connected To……”
There’s the old children’s song, “The Skeleton Dance.” It starts with “the foot bone is connected to the leg bone, the leg bone is connected to the knee bone…” It’s really a discussion of systems. The human body wouldn’t function without all the components or subsystems working together. Business and what we do as sellers is a set of interconnected/interdependent subsystems. For our organization to work, to achieve it’s goals and purpose, each subsystem must work, effectively, together. Regardless of our role, we can only succeed if all the other subsystems we depend upon perform as expected. Systems are complex, […]
Sales Management, We Understand The Pieces/Parts, But Not The Whole
I’m continuing my series on the importance of understanding selling as a complex system. We tend to focus on the pieces/parts of what we do, the responsibilities of our organization, for example marketing, SDRs/Inside Sales, AEs, Account Managers, Sales Engineering, Sales Ops, Sales Enablement. We optimize the pieces parts, yet when taken together they under perform. Today, I want to focus on Sales Management. Specifically, I’ll focus on a major error I made when publishing Sales Manager Survival Guide, and how I had to readjust to correct it. For those of you who’ve read the book, you know it’s a […]
The “Sales Tolerance Stack Up Problem”
As an engineer, I learned it is impossible to design and build the perfect part. While the design itself provides exact specifications, the part would have some variation when actually manufactured. So in designing products, we would always specify the acceptable tolerances for the part. For example, if we wanted to drill a hole in the center of a square plate, we would identify both the size of the hole and the exact center of the hole, +/- a certain tolerance. It might look like “Drill a 1 inch hole 3 inches from the left side, 3 inches from the […]