Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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 Is Coaching?
The term “coaching” has become a catch all word for all sorts of performance improvement practices. When one enters a conversation about “coaching,” it’s often confusing, we may be talking about apples and oranges–both are important, but they are very different. We engage coaches for a variety of different purposes: Personal development for improving our lives. Executive and business coaching to improve leadership and other business related skills. Career coaching, focused on helping navigate career paths. Sports/fitness coaching, helping improve our performance in selected sport related activities. Health/wellness, which may focus on nutrition, lifestyle. Educational coaching, focused on developing learning […]
Doing The Work Is Not An “Opt-In” Possibility…..
Maybe I’m being hard-nosed or lacking in sensitivity, but I’m amazed at how much lack of accountability we accept in performance of people’s jobs. Too often, it seems that we treat many of our accountabilities as optional. The examples are rampant. Things like, using the sales process, maintaining high quality/healthy pipelines, leveraging the tools and technologies we put in place, coaching/developing our people, and on and on. We put the things in place that enable us to achieve our goals. Yet too often, perhaps through lack of attention, leveraging them seems to be optional. We provide tools to help improve […]
On Communicating……
Communicating, engaging other people in conversations to achieve a goal, underlies every business decision, every complex B2B opportunity. Without, somehow coming to agreement, nothing happens. Yet, we are overwhelmed with all sorts of data and research that customers don’t want to talk to sellers, that our people are disengaged in their conversations with their managers. And our personal experience mirrors the data. We don’t respond to sales outreaches to us, even though we are doing the same thing to our customers. We know how bad those conversations are likely to be. We steel ourselves for the “review” with our managers, […]
…….This Is Personalization???!!?
“You have to personalize your outreach, if you expect to engage your prospects……” This is the mantra of all sorts of gurus and people interested in selling you programs/tools to help personalize. While it’s not wrong, the implementation goes way off base. Here’s a prospecting email I got today: “Hey David, Saw on LinkedIn that you attended University of California, Berkeley. Did you ever join the Students for Justice in Palestine’s annual “Shut Down the CIA” event? I heard it’s a powerful tradition advocating for social justice and awareness on campus. By the way, I noticed you’re the founder of […]
Are We Losing The Customer In Our GTM Strategies?
There are never ending, and important discussions, about our Go To Market (GTM) strategies. We talk about organizational structures and functions involved in our GTM implementation. We talk about metrics we leverage to understand performance, and goals driven to scale growth. The discussions about our GTM strategies are endless. And they are important. But that’s the starting point. We need to move beyond GTM to look at our Go To Customer (GTC) strategies. Unfortunately, this is where the great disconnect occurs. A market is not a customer. It’s an aggregation of thousands and millions of customers. We look define our […]
You Don’t Have To Be Right…..
Charlie Green and I were talking about “modern sales outreach/success.” We contrasted what we see in too many demand gen and prospecting programs, with what we have seen that drives higher quality customer engagement. Most of “modern outreach,” is a variant of two approaches: Both approaches are product focused, “products in search of buyers.” They focus on our goals as sellers and not engaging the customer in discussions about their business and problems. If we hit the customer at the right moment, they might say “Let’s talk….,” but we know how increasingly rare that is. But, unless the customer is […]