Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
What Is Your Value Proposition?
We know value propositions are critical to our success with our customers. Without a differentiated value proposition, perhaps the only way we can win is on price. And we know that competing only on price is an unsustainable strategy. We know that value propositions are not just an “end.” “Buy our product, you will see these results……” We know that we have to create value in every interaction with the customer. And that value accumulates, builds trust, and confidence. And doing this, consistently, through the relationship enables us to grow and expand the relationship with the customer. We know the […]
Continuous Improvement, How Do We Get Better?
Continuing my series on applying Lean/Agile principles to our GTM strategies, I want to move on to the ideal of “Continuous Improvement.” In the original development of Lean/Agile principles in manufacturing, leaders recognized they could never rest on their laurels. The concept, “we are doing the best possible, we have to keep doing it, but we are doing enough, we don’t have to change,” was completely foreign to these leaders. They were driven by the concept of continuing to innovate and improve. “Can we improve quality, reducing costs and waste?” “Can we improve our efficiency, getting more done for the […]
Personas Are Not People, Personalization Is Not Connection!
Often, I feel like I’m shouting into a void. Complex B2B buying and selling is about people connecting with people! It’s about human beings interacting with other human beings to accomplish shared goals. Business is, largely, about how we most effectively leverage our human resources (along with others) to most effectively and effectively accomplish our goals. But all our behaviors tend to be pushing in the opposite direction, we driven to remove “people” from the equation. I suspect part of that is the messiness of humans interacting with each other. Certainly, there are a number of buying/selling interactions that can […]
Do You Trust Your People To Solve Problems?
Continuing my series on applying lean/agile manufacturing principles to selling, I was reminded by Charles Green and Dave Jackson about an important aspect of these principles that is never mentioned by those promoting lean/agile in our sales assembly lines. When you actually spend time on a manufacturing line, you see how problems are resolved on the assembly line. It’s called Jidoka or Autonomation. It means “automation with human intelligence.” If the machine or a human operator determines a problem an Andon cord is pulled. It immediately stops the manufacturing line, lights go on to identify the problem area. The team, […]
Pursuing Efficient Ineffectiveness…..
We have long been consumed with efficiency in our GTM efforts. We spend billions in providing tools and technologies to increase the efficiency. For years, we’ve focused on how we can pack more outbound emails, social, and calls into each hour. We can generate 1000s of “personalized” outreaches in each hour. And AI has shown us how we can scale these to even higher levels. We have tools that help us in preparing for calls/meetings with prospects and customers. They help us research, target. We can incorporate engagement data. And again, AI has does much of that work for us, […]
Thinking About “Sales Waste”
It’s become the fashion to apply lean/agile manufacturing approaches to our selling and GTM strategies. There are some principles we can learn from manufacturing (just as there are some we can learn from design/development, procurement and other sectors). But after spending years working closely with manufacturing executives, going through “Black Belt,” lean, and agile training programs, I have serious reservations about the rigidity with which these principles are being applied. But there is one aspect critical to lean/agile manufacturing that seems to be absent in every conversation I see about Revenue Architecture and lean manufacturing processes. Anyone who has spent […]