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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
Who’s Your Laziest Salesperson?
Increasingly, there is a tendency to measure our value by activities and our “busyness.” Managers set activity metrics, rigorously measuring performance against those metrics. Sales people rush from activity to activity, seldom having the time to meet their goals. We implement new technologies, enabling our people to increase the number of activities they can accomplish in a given period. And when those activities fail to achieve the outcomes we want, we just increase the activity requirements. The thinking is always, “we will produce more results if we just do more….” Yet the market data shows year after year of declining […]
Committed To Failing
We have very confused attitudes and beliefs about failure and failing. In sales and marketing, specifically, this confusion is somewhat ironic, since failure is such a large part of what we do. Recently I wrote about a terribly dangerous view about failure: “Making It Safe To Fail, Hogwash!” There’s a lot of social pscho-babble on failure, the thinking parallels the thinking that, “everyone gets a trophy, win, lose, just show up….., it’s the effort that counts!” I, also, suggested a different perspective in, “Making It Safe To Succeed.” This post will, for the time being, wrap up my temper tantrum […]
Making It Safe To Succeed
Recently, I wrote, “Making It Safe To Fail, Hogwash!” It was a rant about the social psycho-babble around failure. We seem to have a culture that revels in failure–that is encouraging people to experiment, learn, innovate, and grow through “making it safe to fail.” Yet, we never talk about the concept of “making it safe to succeed.” Some might think it’s the other side of the same coin. I actually think it’s quite different. Think about it for your own organization, for a moment. As a leader, are you doing everything possible to make it safe for your people to […]
Making It Safe To Fail? Hogwash!
I read an article from a very large consulting company entitled, “Have you made it safe to fail?” Frankly, it’s social psycho-babble. It’s the equivalent of saying, “everyone gets a trophy, regardless of whether they win or lose.” The article will draw eyeballs, but I think they miss the point, consequently much of the value around failure. The authors do, correctly state, that failure is part of the learning process. Something which too many fail to recognize and execute. Too often, we tend to punish failure and we fail to understand what caused the failure, taking corrective action. The authors, […]
If Cold Calling Is Dead, Why Is The Topic So Hot?
Someone tried to suck me into a LinkedIn discussion on cold calling today. The article declaring cold calling dead was written by a colleague I deeply respect, and I have no disagreement with the points in her article. By the time another friend tried to bait me into diving into the discussion, it had been live for 18 hours, there were over 75 reactions and over 52 comments, with many very smart and dull people weighing in. Thankfully, I chose not to dive into this masturbatory debate. But I’ll comment here but not to reach a conclusion. There will be […]
Social Selling, Bar Hopping, And Relationship Commoditization
Listen to the proponents of “Social Selling,” and it is the future of selling. It is the way for us to “develop relationships,” extend our reach, capture new prospects and customers. The Social Selling experts talk about extending the size of your networks, many talking about how many 100’s or 1000’s of connections their methods can help you achieve in weeks. The platforms, themselves, are structured to facilitate making thousands of connections. I remember the early days of LinkedIn, where with each connection, they warned you to only connect with people you know well. In many cases it was very […]