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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
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 […]
Sales And Marketing Alignment Or Integration?
I wonder if we need to rethink our concepts of sales and marketing and how we organize to provide those functions within the organization. Looking back, historically, it has made sense to separate the functions. Marketing was primarily focused on creating visibility and awareness. It typically dealt with markets and industries, not customers. It’s job was to make masses of people and organizations aware of our companies and our products. It created high level interest that would attract people to want to learn more. Typically, it dealt with things like PR, advertising, events, and other methods of driving awareness. It […]
Being A Buyer Is A Foreign Concept To Customers
As sales people, we know what our job is. We have to generate revenue through finding customers who have a need for our solution. We do the same things day after day. We prospect to find new opportunities, we work on deals, helping the customer move through their buying process and selecting a solution. We are constantly working with people in various stages of their buying journey, preparing for meetings, educating customers, conducting demonstrations, doing research, developing and presenting proposals. While each situation is different, in general, the activities we do are similar. We even have processes that help guide […]
Are You “Connecting” With Your People?
I was coaching an outstanding sales manager. She’s committed to her team and improving the performance of each person on the team. She cares deeply for each of them and their success. She coaches each person, having a very disciplined approach in leveraging data and how they worked. She reached out to me saying, “Dave, I think I’m doing the right things in working with my people, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Somehow, I’m not connecting.” Her situation is not unusual. I see managers at all levels who are trying to do the right things with their people […]
Leadership Malpractice
I hate to start posts with a disclaimer, but I will. This post and topic may be viewed as controversial, many executives and leaders will be offended. I hope that some of them have open mindsets and considers questioning their leadership and responsibility to their people and organizations.. Lately, there have been a lot of stories about Better.com’s CEO firing 900 people, 9% of their employee base, in a Zoom call. While it is a dramatic example, other than doing this over Zoom, we see too much of this behavior across too many organizations. Massive layoffs and firings are the […]