Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Taking Initiative Or Playing It Safe?
We want our people to take initiative. When they see opportunities to drive greater success, we want them to seize those opportunities. When they encounter a difficult customer situation, we want them to figure it out and resolve it. While we develop playbooks, processes, and methodologies to help our people perform and succeed, these can never anticipate everything that will arise. We want to encourage our people to figure things out, to be agile and adapt. Of course, it’s important to provide some boundaries. We can’t have them do things that are unethical. We may provide constraints to their creativity […]
Are We Missing The Point?
For decades, tools/technologies have been developed with the promise of freeing up seller time to do that which is most critical–connecting with and engaging customers. We have 1000s of tools that demonstrably improve our efficiency. We can get much more done in much less time. In the past few years, AI and LLMs have amplified that. Not only do these tools enable us to accomplish more in less time, but they provide high levels of personalization and deep research on the organizations and individuals we are targeting. We have more data to leverage in each outreach than we have had […]
“Self Centeredness”
I was tempted to title this post, Selfishness. But I realized I’m not really describing selfishness. Being self centered, we are focused on our own needs, desires, goals and aspirations. Selfishness, by contrast, is that same focus, but at the expense of others. The selfish focus on win/lose. It’s toxic and cannot be tolerated in any environment. Self centeredness is different, it can prioritize, “my success, my win….,” but not at the expense of others. But self centeredness, while not toxic like selfishness, can be very limiting. The concept of WIIFM, What’s In It For Me, can be both selfish […]
Bench Strength!
Reading an “obscure article,” I was reminded of an important leadership principle. It’s something I’ve not seen anywhere in discussions of leadership, GTM, or building business. It’s the concept of building Bench Strength. Building bench strength focuses not only on the current performance of people in the organization, but it focuses on developing their capabilities for the future. It focuses on developing people’s abilities to step into new roles and make greater contributions to the organization. We know the importance of bench strength in sports teams. Back-filling an injured player, bringing in someone with deep skills for the situation, minimizing […]
Conversations……
Let’s step out of our selling roles for a moment and talk about conversations. Think about the conversations you have within your own organizations. Think about the conversations you have with colleagues and partners. In reflecting on those conversations, what are the characteristics of the most impactful conversations and meetings? Think, also, of the meetings that were a massive waste of time. What are the characteristics of those meetings? (Unfortunately, we seem to spend too much time in those.) Let’s look at the most impactful conversations and meetings. Whether one on one or group discussions, the best have many of […]
Can You Hold Up Your Side Of The Conversation?
We have tools and technology that “equip” us for conversations with our customers. In years past, it might have taken hours to put that together, preparing for a single call. Now, all of it is at our fingertips. The problem is, these are the starting points to a conversation. And if they work, as we would hope they work, can we carry on the conversation? Too often, the conversations go like this, “I’ve noticed market expansion is a key strategy of your company. We help our customers expand their markets with these solutions, can I schedule a demo?” Or, “You […]