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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’s A Full Pipeline/Funnel?
I participated in a fascinating discussion about Disqualification. It was on LinkedIn, led by Steve Hall. Click on the link to look at the comments, it’s pretty interesting. But a part of the discussion was really intriguing and brought out how badly we understand pipeline’s and our numbers. As a result, we drive for the wrong things and fail to produce results. It started with me taking my usual extreme position around Vicious Disqualification. Along with Steve and others, we believe sales people waste too much time chasing the wrong deals. Too many pipelines are filled with garbage–stuff that isn’t […]
My Journey On Micro-Improvements
Long time readers of the blog will know for the past 18-24 months I’ve been obsessed with the concept of micro-improvements—how do I get 1% better each day? For closed to two years–well up to 6 weeks ago—I tracked and scored myself on a series of questions. Thing like, “Did I set clear goals for the day; Did I do my best to achieve those goals; Was I getting the right exercise; Am I minimizing distractions…..” For over a year, scoring myself every day, reflecting on what I did and didn’t do seemed to be working. I was seeing better […]
Starting At “Zero,” Again…..
Sales is about the only profession, where each fiscal year, we have the opportunity to start at zero. What we have done in the past year, good or bad, is past. We all have a clean slate to start all over again. As we look at this clean slate, we have an opportunity. We can continue to do the same things we have always done, replaying past years over and over, probably producing similar results. Or we can consider this a fresh start. We can reassess what we have done, what we need to do. We can look at what […]
Zero-Based Sales Planning
As we start a new year, perhaps your plans are locked in. But perhaps there is an opportunity to rethink or, even to reinvent what we think about the sales function and how we sell. So much of what we do is done just because, “That’s the way we’ve always done things.” We think we may have evolved, but in reality we’ve just applied a layer of technology and updated language and jargon. For example rather than being customer focused and consultative, we are insight driven. But fundamentally, we are doing the things we have always done, but perhaps at […]
On Consistency
I don’t know why, but we never talk about consistency. Consistency is about what we do every day, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. Consistency is a key foundation for learning and improvement. We can’t develop new skills unless we apply them day after day, week after week….. Somehow consistency seems to be anathema to how we work and behave. We are event driven. We have the new program, we try it out for a few days or weeks, until we are bored (Ironically, we do this even for things that work). Then we […]
What We Think Of Our Customers Colors Our Engagement
Someone called seeking coaching on a specific deal. He had fallen into traps which blinded him in moving forward with a winning strategy. He started the conversation with, “The key decisionmaker is really a jerk! He’s power hungry, his people want to do something with us, they’ve presented compelling arguments, but he doesn’t want to go forward……. They are losing so much opportunity, if they only they would implement our system……” A few moments later in the conversation, I learned, “…..He’s relatively new in his role, he’s turning everything upside down, his past experience is with our competitor, so he’s […]