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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
Metrics Don’t Solve The Problem!
I was tempted to title this, “Metrics, metrics, everywhere, but not a solution in sight,” as a twist on the famous line in Coleridge’s “The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner.” We are drowning in data. We live in a world where tools, including AI, can provide endless analyses and insights into the data. We establish endless metrics that help us track trends and performance. We inflict endless, sometimes contradictory metrics on our people, mostly overwhelming and confusing them. We live by the numbers–or worse, by the metrics–thinking they are the answers to all our problems and challenges. But they aren’t! […]
“They Were Making The Final Decision….Then Crickets….”
It’s only Wednesday and already, I’ve had conversations with 5 different teams on the same issue. They had strong deals, great interest from the customers, pricing had been worked out. They were waiting for the final decision, some already spending their expected commissions. And then things went quiet. Their customers stopped responding. These forecasted deals suddenly slipped away. As they walked through things, they talked about how interested the customers were, how they could see the impact of implementing the solutions. They had preliminary pricing discussions, no significant objections from customers. They even started discussing roll-out and implementation. They thought […]
Resurrecting “MBWA”
When was the last time when you stepped out from behind your screens and reports to actually talk to and engage the people doing the work? In the late 70’s Tome Peters and Bob Waterman started talking about the concept of Management By Walking Around . In was a cornerstone of In Search Of Excellence (1982). At the time, they believed leaders were losing touch with what was really happening in their companies. They sat in their offices, participated in meetings with their direct reports, but were seldom engaged with their people. In some organizations, it went so far as […]
Conditions Of Employment
Too often, we reduce our expectations of work to quota performance, goals, and activity metrics. But there is another layer beneath these. There are expectations we have of our people in being a part of our organizations. These expectations are more foundational. In working in our organizations, we expect people to: None of these are optional. Generally, they aren’t role specific, rather than organizational expectations. Sometimes, we encompass many of these in vague conversations about, “culture.” Sometimes, we assume these are business/cultural norms that everyone understands. We don’t outline them or discuss them because we think they should already know. […]
Sometimes, I Feel Outdated….
I laugh about being an “Old Fart.” I can actually remember the days before email, but only a few years before we started actually using email. And I remember our research scientists talking about an interesting new technology called “The World Web,” spawning the term www. My first mobile device was the size of a brick and weighed about as much. I pride myself to adjusting and adapting to current times. I have all the latest technology, I pepper my language with words like Rizz, Slay, Delulu. Acronyms like TL:DR, ICYMI, SMH are all commonplace (OK, OK, ChatGPT helped me […]
Selling Is About Helping People….
In recent conversations with friends like Brent Adamson, Charlie Green, Mark Modesti, Alice Heiman, and others a common theme keeps surfacing: “Selling is about helping people….” Over the past years, too many seem to have forgotten this. Or people new to selling have never learned this. The focus is about our own success, our objectives. The customer becomes the object, perhaps obstacle to our success. We’ve redesigned our engagement processes to minimize the human connection. We design our engagement processes, optimizing for efficiency, outsourcing a much of the process as possible to AI. We avoid any human interaction unless it’s […]