Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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.
Sadly, too many managers seem to mindlessly echo the same meaningless mantra from some hopelessly outdated sales manager playbook. The answer to every performance issue seems to be simply, “Do more!” The “more” that’s identified is usually more of something that has worked in the past, without assessing whether it is still the right course of action. As a result, we get mindless guidance like, “Just do more prospecting,” “Just get more opportunities in your pipeline,” “Win more,” “Spend more time [doing something],” and on and on. And when those don’t work, we know the answer, “Just do more……..” Inevitably, […]
Read MoreRecently, the CEO of a company shared the agenda for his management offsite meeting. Agenda: – Review key metrics (30 min) – Discuss service growth plan (30 min) – Discuss 2020 product vision (30 min) – Discuss pricing / packaging (6 hours) 😂 – Harbor boat ride (90 minutes) I see dozens of these every year. Some for meetings I’ve been invited to participate in, some from my coaching clients. They’re not much different than the one outlined above. Yes, some of the specifics are different, but generally, they focus on a lot of internal business topics. The one thing […]
Read MoreLeverage is an important concept in business, sales, and marketing. Unfortunately, we spend too little time understanding leverage and identifying leverage opportunities in coaching and developing our people. Perhaps, our aversion to leverage is the negative connotations of the word. Too often, it’s construed as using some sort of manipulation or unfair/unethical tactics. This use of leverage is clearly wrong and seldom produces sustainable results. In this discussion of leverage, I’d like to focus on “How do we identify and prioritize those things that have the greatest impact on our results or our abilities to achieve our goals?” One of […]
Read MoreHave you ever put together a jigsaw puzzle? Recently, I was sitting in a hotel lobby. The staff had put out one of those 1000 piece puzzles. It turned out to be a fascinating social experience–strangers were sitting down together, trying to place pieces in the right spots. It was huge fun! Puzzles are interesting, and they are an intriguing metaphor for sales. The pieces of the puzzle don’t make any sense by themselves. A single piece of the puzzle is meaningless, we don’t understand the picture, we don’t even know where/how it fits. But taken together, all the pieces […]
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