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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
Leadership Is About Making Choices
I have to confess, this article was provoked reading the newspaper about the upcoming elections. Many “leaders,” political and otherwise, are making statements. Some are choosing not to vote, one feels that a write in vote for “Ronald Reagan” demonstrates his leadership and thoughtfulness. While it’s been those incidents that got me thinking about the issue, I reflected on so many situations I see in business. Too often, I see leaders failing to make decisions, failing to take action to address issues that impact organizational performance. For example, too often, we see leaders failing to take action on people issues. […]
Back To Basics
I saw an article in my newsfeed by McKinsey: How European marketing and sales leaders handle COVID-19’s effects. In reading it, I was underwhelmed. There was nothing really new, what they were talking about was really sound leadership and management practice—COVID crisis or not. Reflecting on it, I realized, perhaps that’s the point! Basic principles, thoughtful leadership, sharp execution always work! Contexts change–but these basics always enable people and the organization to respond and adapt much more quickly. What the COVID crisis, or any crisis for that matter, has done is made visible our bad practice. It’s made them visible […]
LinkedIn Automation At It’s Worst!
LinkedIn is fast becoming as useless as many of the other social channels. Most of it is not LinkedIn’s fault—though it’s algorithm seems to favor “Broems.” It’s really the fault of those selling training and LinkedIn automation tools that seek not to create value in relationships, but only to deluge people with mindless messages. Below is a message stream I just received. The only editing I have done is to disguise the sender. It’s unbelievable, I get one of the standard, “Here’s what we do/sell, I’d like to arrange a meeting to see how we can help you.” Where normally, […]
Mistakes Will Be Made….
Too often, we live in fear of failure. We live in fear of making mistakes. In spite of this, mistakes will be made. Too often, bad leaders punish those that have made mistakes, never tolerating failure. In spite of this, mistakes will be made. If we fear making mistakes, we do nothing, because if we did something, we might make a mistake. We revert to what we have always done, ironically, even if it isn’t working as well in the past. We wait and respond, so we don’t make a mistake, when that waiting may have been the mistake. We […]
The “Silver Lining” Behind What We Are Experiencing
In the past 6+ months, the world has turned upside down. We have never faced simultaneous health, economic, social crises at the global scale that we are currently experiencing. We long for things to get back to normal. I dream of sitting in an airport–going to visit a client. Or sitting in a restaurant, enjoying a meal with friends, or going to a concert or the theater, or getting back into the gym. It’s natural to want to get back to our “lives.” But, the pandemic, has created a tremendous opportunity—individually and organizationally. It is forcing us to disrupt ourselves, […]
Is Prospecting Really The Toughest Thing In Sales?
Was just reading yet another post with “market data” declaring prospecting the most difficult aspect of sales. Thousands of blog posts about both the difficulty and importance of prospecting have been published in the past 5-7 years. But is it really tougher than anything else in selling or are we just making it much tougher than it need be? Or possibly our problems are that too many sales people just don’t want to prospect? They want to be handed qualified leads–ideally qualified to the point that all the sales person need to is ask for a PO. Or possibly we […]