Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
When The Formulas Don’t Work
We spend a lot of time trying to figure out what works. We look for methods, processes, programs, tools, systems, training that help us achieve our objectives. Sometimes they work, at least for a while. Sometimes they don’t work. Sometimes, too often, we don’t give them the opportunity to work–abandoning them to chase some other miracle cure. It doesn’t take a lot of brilliance or insight when something is working. You just keep doing it–perhaps refining it to continue to improve. The problem is when the formulas don’t work. We don’t take the time to understand what’s happening. We don’t […]
Pleeaaasse….. Can I Be Selected To Give You My Money…..
A close friend–a consultant who is one of the best sales experts I’ve met forwarded me a prospecting letter he received. There is nothing good about the approach. In fact, it reeks of arrogance and condescension. Even worse, it purports to challenge my friend in an area in which he is a recognized expert. Here’s the letter, names/links adapted…. Hi Don, Hey Don, [Carl] here. [Ben] “green-lighted” me to offer you a free 1-on-1 analysis of your current sales development pipeline. If that interests you, let’s talk. Apply to book a call with me here. Just to give you an […]
Does The Right Hand Know What The Left Hand Is Doing?
In our organizational silos, we tend to build our plans in isolation from those in other silos within our organization. While we may be looking at, on a silo basis, building very aggressive goals, collectively, they may be well designed to have us completely miss our goals and under perform. One of the biggest problem areas I see is in linking demand gen/prospecting with overall business results. Let me give an example to illustrate. Recently, I worked with an organization that realized the need to significantly expand their lead gen and prospecting. They set very aggressive goals–more than double what […]
Person Or Personality?
One of my favorite writers is John McPhee. Recently, I was rereading a short story, A Philosopher In The Kitchen. It’s outstanding, both as a masterpiece in writing and in the ideas he conveys. While it’s about a chef, it provokes thinking about the highest levels of practice in any profession. One of the lines that struck me, “He would like to be known for what he does, but in this time, in this country, his position is awkward, for he prefers being a person to becoming a personality…” Today, we seem to live in a world where people aspire […]
Hanging Out With People Different From Me
It’s human nature to hang out people like us. Perhaps the people we are grow up with, perhaps those we went to school with. We tend to gravitate to people like us. Maybe it’s the shared experiences and backgrounds. Maybe it’s the comfort factor, the camaraderie. It shapes every part of our lives. Where we live, our friendships, where we work. We tend to hire people who look like us, who have similar backgrounds and experiences. We see things similarly, we have similar instincts and reactions. We learn, but we focus on learning the same things. We change, but we […]
“Seek first to understand…..
One of the most important things a sales person can do with her customer is to “understand.” One of the most important things great leaders do is to try to “understand.” Instead, we tend to focus, selfishly, on being “understood.” That is, focusing on our own priorities, self interests, agendas and what we seek to achieve. Dr. Stephen Covey’s fifth habit, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood,” is a fundamental principle of selling and leadership, yet it is rare that I see this principle exercised. Until we understand our customers–individually and organizationally, we have no context in which […]