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
You’re A Loser—-And That’s A Great Start!
“WTF! What’s this guy talking about???? We don’t want losers, we want winners……” A lot of you are scratching your heads, thinking, “Dave’s really gone off the deep end, this time!” Hang in there, let’s talk about losing! But first, let’s talk about winning. We put winners on pedestals. we revere them, we aspire to be like them. But there’s a problem with winning. It never forces us to stop, rethink things, change and adapt. We keep doing the same things we’ve always done………. until, suddenly we realize the world and our customers have changed. And we become losers!! Welcome […]
Are You Achieving Your Potential?
Every month, one of the most important conversations I have is with Lahat Tzvi. While we schedule a 60 minute discussion, they usually last about 2 hours, we have to stop ourselves because they can go on. (Both he and I have taken to blocking our calendars because we know we will go on.) We go from subject to subject, generally focusing on a couple of areas. Today, Lahat was wound up. Earlier, he had a conversation with a prospective client. The client was focused on “the numbers.” Lahat realized the client was missing something, they weren’t focused on the […]
Where’s The Passion?
As the year comes to a close, I find myself in a lot of conversations combining both reflection on what has happened and forward looking perspectives on the coming year. There’s a common element to these conversations–the people that reach out to me tend to share similar mindsets to mine. That common element is best described as “passion.” While the word never surfaces, it underlies each of these conversations. With some it’s expressed as extreme competitiveness. For example, this past Friday, I had a conversation with a long time client who leads one of the highest performing organizations in their […]
Customers Can’t Tell You What They Need!
I think since the first book on selling was ever written, we have internalized the discovery process. In this process, we focus on understanding the customer needs. We have endless lists, of questions to discover our customers needs. Most of these questions are biased to features and capabilities of our products. These need questions tend to focus on the solution, naturally. Our discovery processes tend to focus on the capabilities of the solution, which is what we care about. The problem with this solution focused discovery process, is we only engage the customer once they have gone through the majority […]
“Cheat Codes…..”
Every morning while I’m having my first coffee, I take a quick look at LinkedIn. I limit myself to 3 swipes on my IPhone. There are two dominant classes of content (discounting the increasing ads). The first is “My story….” These are either, “Here are the hardships I overcame….” or “I’ve made millions of dollars each year….” The other category are the “Cheat codes.” Cheat codes are presented by “experts,” claiming they have discovered the secrets to success, and they present those secrets as “cheat codes.” They cover everything you possibly could want. The secrets to cold emails, how to […]
Metrics Don’t Produce Revenue!
I continue to be stunned by the dashboards people show me. The variety of things we can track and measure is amazing. Add onto this, much of it is in real time. We no longer have to wait until the end of the week/month to get reports. I reflect back to the “old days,” imagine the stone ages of 10 years ago. Then, we might have had some pipeline reports and manually generated activity reports, and they were seldom in real time. Today it’s amazing. We can track where our customers/prospects are poking their noses on our websites, even other […]