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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
It’s A New Year, What Should We Be Asking Ourselves?
It’s a New Year. Somehow, even if we don’t believe in New Year resolutions, we use the New Year as a moment to refocus and reset. For those organizations on a calendar fiscal year, it’s a restart—new goals, quotas, perhaps shifted priorities. Even for those organizations with a different fiscal year, subconsciously we tend to reflect and reset much of what we to. As we ramp up into the New Year, what are some of the key things we should be thinking about? What are questions we might ask ourselves? Perhaps we should take a few moments before going into […]
How Do We Make People Better Off By Working With Us?
Reading an article about Patagonia’s and other’s strategies, I was struck by the sentence, “How do we make people better off by working with us?” It’s a fundamental question that has so many applications: Our customers? Our employees? Our suppliers? Our shareholders? Our communities? Usually, when we think about thing, we focus on our return, we answer the question, “How do we make things better for ourselves?” As sales people, we focus on our goals, quotas, and commissions. The customer is only a vehicle for achieving those. As leaders, too often, we focus on ourselves and our own goals. Again, […]
“Sensemaking” Is Not Just For Our Customers
Brent Adamson wrote an outstanding HBR article on “Sensemaking For Sales.” It’s an important concept, focused on helping our customers make higher quality decisions, with greater confidence. One of the most important things Brent discusses is how customers tend to cope when faced so much high quality information. Customers tend to fall back on what they already know and have confidence in. These cognitive biases tend to drive “belief perseverance,” and “status quo bias,” doing what we’ve always done. Brent, also, highlights three styles that sales people adopt to help their customers. The “giving” approach is one where the sales […]
DIGITAL transformation Or digital TRANSFORMATION
You can’t look at anything in sales, marketing, even business without encountering the discussions of Digital Transformation. What’s interesting is where people put the emphasis. Often, particularly with vendors, the emphasis is on the DIGITAL, that is the technology. Technology is enabling us to do things we have never been able to do. It’s just not making us more efficient or increasing the volume/velocity of what we do. It can help us discover things that we might never have seen before, or would have taken years to understand. It enables us to make decisions, change, do new things that drive […]
What Got Us Here Won’t Get Us To Where We Need To Be
Part of what enables us to achieve is our experience and past success. Stated differently, we tend to repeat the things we have always done because they worked for us in the past. This is both a good and bad news principle. The good news side of it is that understanding what works, systematizing it, repeating and scaling it enables us to continue to perform and grow. Leveraging our past experience, systematizing it, doing it repeatedly, becomes second nature. We don’t have to think about it, we have developed the habits and it becomes easy. It would be foolish to […]
Making “The Number” May Not Be Enough!
I was meeting with the executive team of an organization. They were proud, as they should have been, of their performance. For the past 5 years, they had been consistently hitting their revenue goal. It hadn’t been easy, but each year, they somehow managed to pull it out and hit their goal. After congratulating them on their performance, I asked, “Why do you want to talk to me?” Even over Zoom, I could see them squirming in their seats. Finally the CRO said, “I think we could do better……” We had a fascinating discussion, it turned out they were significantly […]