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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 If Our Sellers Had More Autonomy?
Reading a fascinating article in the NYTimes, Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results, got me thinking. What if we give our people more autonomy in how they manage their deals, days, what they do? In the past 5-7 years, we’ve seen a movement to be completely prescriptive with our people and their activities. We script every conversation, yet the customers we are engaging don’t have the same script. Customer engagement plummets. We structure and architect each day, week, month. We assign number of dials, outreaches, meetings per day. Yet, our customers don’t want to talk to us. We assign […]
Minimum Viable Metrics
One of the key strategies for very early stage companies, for new product developers, or lean practitioners, is the concept of the “Minimum Viable Product.” It’s a very customer centric approach in launching new products. It seeks to minimize the risk to the company by introducing a product with just enough functionality to gain interest, then to learn from that, quickly improving and enhancing the product. If you look to many unicorns, they started with a MVP, learning from their first product introductions, then quickly growing from it. Companies like AirBnB, Zappos, Uber. Even Amazon and OpenAI have leveraged the […]
“Have You Learned Your Lesson Yet?!”
During the Holidays, together with family, often the conversation goes back to old memories. In one of these conversations, my Mom and Sister ganged up on me. They reminded me of the struggles my Dad and I had with my misbehavior. It seemed, stupidly, I kept doing the same bad things, over and over. I kept making the same mistakes, I kept getting caught. My Dad would sit down with me, frustrated, talking about these things. “You keep doing the same things, you keep getting caught, have you learned your lesson yet?” I finally figured out I hadn’t. Despite all […]
Achievement, Trying Hard, Participation, Apathy…..
Adam Grant posted an editorial in the NY Times, No, You Don’t Get An A For Effort. It’s fascinating, but only focuses on part of what I see in too many organizations. As we go into the New Year, perhaps it’s useful to look at these and reflect on what we might want to change as we go into 2025 (Since we seem to look at the New Year as the event that grants us permission to improve.) I’ll rephrase his positioning and add two more individual and organizational behaviors I observe: Accomplishment, Trying Hard (Effort), Participation, Apathy. Achievement is […]
Distraction And Focus
At the end of the year, I tend to be a little more reflective than during the rest of the year. In part, this post is a reminder to me about how I get distracted and lose focus–way too easily. In part, it’s an observation of things I see every day. What provoked this happened a few days ago. I was treating myself to a breakfast at a favorite restaurant. I’m a regular, they know my favorite table is in the back where I can observe everyone else. I was struck by a couple a few tables away from me. […]
A (Not So) Comedy Of Errors….
I have spent several hours in the past few days apologizing to any number of customer service agents. Every time I am directed to speak to another agent (apparently going up the food chain in escalating problems), I have restated the same words, “I’m so sorry that I’m frustrated and angry! It’s not your fault, but it’s your company and it’s complete inability to address my issues, that is making me angry! You are just doing your job, and time after time, your company is failing both you and me.” And they always apologize, politely and sincerely, stating their goal […]