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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 Algorithm Conundrum
Everything in marketing and sales is about “the algorithm.” Each of us is a critical part of algorithm’s–actually we are probably critical parts of hundreds to thousands of algorithms, since each is optimized for different purposes. There are algorithms that track our online behaviors, theoretically to present content that is more aligned to interests derived from our behaviors. The theory is to make it easier to find things the algorithms think we might be interested in. Since the algorithms, are designed an implemented by people other than ourselves, the reality is they better serve the designers’ interests than ours. That […]
Settling…….
Our jobs, as sales and marketing professionals, is to drive change. We can only do our jobs when our customers decide their current state is unacceptable. They need to address new opportunities, they need to solve problems, they need to rethink and do things differently. Often, customers incite themselves to change. Perhaps it’s problems, perhaps competitive threat, perhaps it’s being opportunistic. Sometimes there is a visionary leader that provokes that change. Sometimes, it’s we that incent the customers to change, whether through our content at our websites, our customers talking to others, or our prospecting. Our ideal customers are those […]
If Practice Makes Perfect, Why Do We Keep Practicing The Wrong Things?
We know to master any skill, it takes practice. It may be Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours to mastery. Or we look at what great athletes, artist, musicians, and others do. They are constantly practicing to improve their skills and capabilities. We know that to get really good at anything, we have to continue to work on developing our capabilities to do the things that produce the outcomes we hope to achieve. With sales, it’s no different. We have to continue to practice, we have to develop our skills, learning and improving our ability to execute. We learn through repeated prospecting […]
There Is No Excuse For Not Doing Your Homework!
To the annoyance of most school children, virtually every night, their parents ask a question, “Did you do your homework?” Growing up, sometimes I would blow off doing my homework, I’d not lie, but I’d find a way not to answer the question. Eventually, that would catch up with me, I’d not be prepared for class, my grades would suffer. I learned, it was easier and better to do my homework, then to fake it. Sometimes, particularly, on difficult assignments, my parents would review my homework. They weren’t doing it to check up on me, but they wanted to help […]
“Did I Do My Best To….”
I’m a big fan of Marshall Goldsmith. One of the methods he uses to help people continuously improve is his set of questions, usually phrased, “Did I do my best to….” I’ve been using this approach, daily, for about 4 years. Each day, I rate myself on about 22 questions. some as simple as “Did I do my best to eat healthy foods…. or exercise.” Some are more challenging like, “Did I do my best to make a difference in someone’s life..” The questions have evolved over time, at one point there were 28 areas I questioned myself on, it’s […]
Win/Loss Analysis–Are You Learning As Much As You Should?
I’m always stunned by how little win/loss analysis we do. Of course, when we win or lose a deal, there is some reason code–usually some drop down in CRM that gives us a handful of choices about why we won or why we lost. Sales people usually don’t put much thought into it, wins are generally the result of the “fantastic job they did selling,” losses are either price or product deficiencies–often both. The win/loss reasons don’t give us much insight into what really is happening, or what we might do about it. Sometimes, usually on the “mega-deals,” we might […]