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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
The Innovation Gray Space
Innovation is critical for all of us. It enables us to…. well, innovate. Innovation underlies change. It enables us to do new and different things, address new and different opportunities/markets, shift our strategies, products, markets. A lot is written about innovation. Much of it focuses on disruptive innovation. Disruptive innovation probably overlaps, significantly, with invention. Disruptive innovation represents something that is brand new, disruptively so. Disruptive innovation may be radically new and different products, business models, processes. For example, the invention of 3-D printing has driven the disruptive innovation of additive manufacturing–changing dramatically how things are manufactured. Businesses like Uber, […]
Rethinking ROI
One of the fundamentals in any kind of solution or value based selling is the ROI produced by the solution. Sadly, too few sales people even understand this, competing on cost and price, leaving the customer to determine the business case and the ROI of implementing a solution themselves. And they must do this, both to get approval to move forward, as well as to evaluate alternatives. Over time, we have developed a much richer perspective of ROI, looking at things like opportunity costs, consequences of not changing or doing something wrong, and the less quantitative aspects of decision confidence, […]
A Bigger Piece Of The Pie
This weekend, in celebration of the beginning of summer, I was invited to a dinner with friends. At the end of dinner, the host brought out one of my favorite desserts, key lime pie. I feigned politeness, letting everyone take their pieces before I served myself. Truthfully, it was pure selfishness, I wanted to get a bigger piece of the pie. For many of us, I’m one of those, there’s always the tendency to go after a bigger piece of the pie. Long time followers know I’m fond of saying, “It’s our God-given right to 100% share of account and […]
Selling And The “Peripheral Players…”
For those of you who haven’t discovered the wisdom and insight of Tom Morris, stop reading now, go to Amazon, order any or all of his books. You will find so much wisdom that help you think about your, your teams, your customers’ success. Follow him on LinkedIn, you will learn so much! With that as an introduction, Tom wrote a fascinating piece on philosophers of the 21st century. Tom thinks limo/taxi/Uber/Lyft drives are among the best, because of what they see every day. I added to the discussion with a perspective on barbers and housekeepers. Tom’s observations got me […]
Flexible Persistence
Reading an outstanding article by Reid Hoffman, False Choices, one term leaped out to me—flexible persistence. It’s such an important and powerful concept. As sellers and managers we get, possibly to a fault, the concept of persistence. We know that success is based on constant and consistent execution of our strategies. We know we will face challenges and resistance–from our people and customers, but that we can’t give up. We know we won’t succeed by doing things randomly, but we must have a structured disciplined approach, that we execute every day, every week, every quarter. We develop our go to […]
The Coming Recession….
I’m starting to get “those” calls. Execs are asking for advice. They are expecting difficult times, they are trying to figure out how to deal with the uncertainty in the economy that all of us face. We’re already seeing the early signs of it. Layoffs, before unimaginable, are happening and more are preparing for reductions. Where a few months ago we were scrambling for talent, comp was skyrocketing to attract the right people; now we are seeing job offers being withdrawn. Execs are also asking, “How do we maintain sales, how do we keep driving revenue as much as possible? […]