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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
Invention, Innovation, Improvement
The three “I’s” are critical to success and growth. What do they mean to sales and marketing? Why are they important to revenue generation functions, what should we be doing about them? First, let’s start with some definitions: An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition or process. (Dave’s take: Something that has never existed before.)Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvements in offering goods or services. (Dave’s take, something that may have existed before, but is being applied in a new or novel way.)Improvement is […]
Why Common Sense Isn’t So Common
I’m re-reading a stunning series of posts Charlie Green wrote several years ago. They are more relevant than ever.. They are entitled, “Five Short Phrases To Build Relationships.” I won’t spoil the fun of discovering these brilliant ideas. Make sure you read and leverage them. What struck me in reading Charlie’s post were they were so simple, so obvious. They were just plain common sense. At the same time, the brilliance of Charlie’s posts is that we fail to leverage these principles too often. Stated differently, we spend a lot of time looking for short cuts, miracle cures, and tricks, […]
“A Seat At The Table….”
Over the past 6-7 years, increasingly, I’ve seen too many discussions about “getting a seat at the table.” Usually, they refer to reporting directly to the CEO. The arguments have come from sales enablement, sales ops, marketing, customer experience, the receptionist at the front desk. OK, I made the last one up, receptionists serve a very important function. They are often the first experience customers, suppliers, the community have of an organization. Because of that importance, perhaps they, too, should get a seat at the table. The table is getting pretty crowded! I have to confess, these discussions seem so […]
“Why Does This Happen?”
The question, “Why Does This Happen,” and its variants (“What causes this to occur, How does this happen, etc?”) are some of the most profound questions we can pose as we look at understanding problems and opportunities. As we start posing these questions, the responses provoke us to follow up with the “What if….., Have you considered…., How might things change if…..? All of these are foundational in engaging our customers to think differently. They are critical as we look at our own strategies and performance. But too often, we fail to do this. Instead of trying to understand how/why […]
Shifting From “I Have To…” To “I Get Too…”
Recently, I was having a conversation with an outstanding sales leader and friend, Robyn Wiseman. Periodically, we get together to exchange ideas. These conversations follow a familiar format; we talk a little about her team and what they are doing, sometimes there’s a little coaching, but mostly it’s recognition of the great job they are doing. What’s fascinating about Robyn and her team is they focus on basic, disciplined execution. No tricks, just focus on the fundamentals and creating value based conversations with prospects and customers. Then our conversation shifts to exploring other topics. In this conversation, I wanted to […]
Lead Follow-up Malpractice
Everyone struggles to generate leads. We struggle to provoke interest, to engage a prospect, to get people to respond to our outreach. The data on responses is, not surprisingly, horrible. We are “happy,” with response rates in fractions of percentage, we know we can generate volume just by doing more. Our abilities to generate leads are bleak. But what astounds me is how poorly we manage those leads we get. Too often, our response to a lead is completely inappropriate, as a result, we lose any possibility to generate a conversation, to nurture and develop a lead. Here’s an example, […]