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
The Pursuit Of Easy……
Continuous improvement is critical to our ability to grow, both as individuals and organizations. Whether it’s to drive higher levels of productivity/performance, responding to changes in our customers or markets, addressing new opportunities, or anything else. We have to constantly be assessing what we do, who we do it to/with, how and why we do these things—and how we improve and do more. It’s easy to fill our days with activities, but activities with an express focus and goal are different. It’s easy to continue doing those activities because the goal becomes the activity, not how the activity contributes to […]
Long Term Effectiveness Requires Short Term Inefficiency!
In a world driven by efficiency, it’s heresy to advocate anything but getting more done in less time. For years, we’ve been obsessed with efficiency. We’ve restructured workflows, leveraging factory models to improve the efficiency at every sales workstation. We implemented processes, methodologies, and technologies that enable us to complete more activities in less time. And, now, AI/LLMs enable us to amplify those activities endlessly. This might be great if all these highly efficient activities were the outcomes expected. But they aren’t, while our efficiency is skyrocketing, the number of activities we can execute in any period of time is […]
What Is Coaching?
The term “coaching” has become a catch all word for all sorts of performance improvement practices. When one enters a conversation about “coaching,” it’s often confusing, we may be talking about apples and oranges–both are important, but they are very different. We engage coaches for a variety of different purposes: Personal development for improving our lives. Executive and business coaching to improve leadership and other business related skills. Career coaching, focused on helping navigate career paths. Sports/fitness coaching, helping improve our performance in selected sport related activities. Health/wellness, which may focus on nutrition, lifestyle. Educational coaching, focused on developing learning […]
Doing The Work Is Not An “Opt-In” Possibility…..
Maybe I’m being hard-nosed or lacking in sensitivity, but I’m amazed at how much lack of accountability we accept in performance of people’s jobs. Too often, it seems that we treat many of our accountabilities as optional. The examples are rampant. Things like, using the sales process, maintaining high quality/healthy pipelines, leveraging the tools and technologies we put in place, coaching/developing our people, and on and on. We put the things in place that enable us to achieve our goals. Yet too often, perhaps through lack of attention, leveraging them seems to be optional. We provide tools to help improve […]
On Communicating……
Communicating, engaging other people in conversations to achieve a goal, underlies every business decision, every complex B2B opportunity. Without, somehow coming to agreement, nothing happens. Yet, we are overwhelmed with all sorts of data and research that customers don’t want to talk to sellers, that our people are disengaged in their conversations with their managers. And our personal experience mirrors the data. We don’t respond to sales outreaches to us, even though we are doing the same thing to our customers. We know how bad those conversations are likely to be. We steel ourselves for the “review” with our managers, […]
…….This Is Personalization???!!?
“You have to personalize your outreach, if you expect to engage your prospects……” This is the mantra of all sorts of gurus and people interested in selling you programs/tools to help personalize. While it’s not wrong, the implementation goes way off base. Here’s a prospecting email I got today: “Hey David, Saw on LinkedIn that you attended University of California, Berkeley. Did you ever join the Students for Justice in Palestine’s annual “Shut Down the CIA” event? I heard it’s a powerful tradition advocating for social justice and awareness on campus. By the way, I noticed you’re the founder of […]