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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
We Keep Falling Out Of Alignment
We depend on each other. I do my job so you can do yours. You do yours so the person next to you can do theirs. That dependence is the whole reason alignment matters. If none of us needed anyone else, we could each go our own way and it wouldn’t cost anything. But we do need each other, and when the handoffs don’t line up, things misfire and results founder. So we try to align. Our instinct is to use a model we know works: the assembly line. Fixed roles, clear handoffs, specific cadences. Every part and every step […]
He Pointed His Finger At Me……
I had a mentor who taught me more in a single gesture than most people manage in a career. We were deep in a conversation about what separates people who succeed from people who don’t, and at some point he started pointing his finger at me to drive home a critical point. He went on for a while like that, shaking the finger forcefully. Then he stopped, held his hand up and said: “Remember, when you point your finger at someone, telling them what they should be doing, one finger is pointing at them, but three are pointing back at […]
Comp Plans Aren’t Your Problem!
I’ve never dreamed of writing about commissions or comp plans. Everyone has their own views about them, and no single answer is right. I have close friends who argue fiercely against commissions, and they lead some of the highest-performing organizations in the world. I’ve also worked with organizations with very strong comp and commission plans, and many are outstanding performers. And yet here I am writing about comp. Why? Increasingly, I’m seeing more organizations not achieving their goals. One of the first issues people focus on is comp and commission. It seems to be the universal solution to performance. I […]
Feedback On Everything Is Feedback On Nothing
I keep seeing the same story, told with minor variations, across my feeds. A team deploys an AI tool that captures every activity: every call, email, meeting. The tool reviews everything, analyzes everything, generates feedback and recommendations on each activity. The author, usually the developer of the tool, brags: “Setup took minutes. No engineers, no integration project….” And then they go through the math. They portray a manager, perhaps with 8-10 sellers, each sending hundreds of emails a day, making dozens of calls, sitting in several meetings. No manager could possibly review everything that’s being done and do the complete […]
Where’s The Differentiation?
We have all sat through the same conversation. The customer has built their short list. Three alternatives, maybe four. We’re one of them. And as we look at the list, if we are honest with ourselves, we know any of these solutions will solve the customer’s problem. The features overlap. The functions are the same. Whatever gaps exist in one offering will be eliminated in the next release. Whatever advantage we thought we had this quarter will be eliminated next quarter. Each of us has seen this in virtually every deal we work. We struggle, thinking, “how do we differentiate […]
Doing The Work
We tend to treat performance problems as knowledge problems. If the results are disappointing, surely the people don’t know what to do. So we train them again. We send them to another workshop, build another playbook, roll out another methodology, buy another tool. And then we are puzzled when nothing changes. But walk into almost any team that is struggling and ask the people what they should be doing. They will tell you. They know they should keep the CRM current. They know they should qualify against the ICP rather than chasing anything that moves. They know the difference between […]
