Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Addressing Performance Issues!
Managers are responsible for maximizing the performance of the people on their team. It seems such a simple and obvious observation, but one that doesn’t seem to be executed. Many managers struggle with understanding this, some retort, “My job is to make the numbers!” But when I ask, “How do you do that,” they start stammering and waving their arms. While it would seem obvious that the only way they can make their numbers is through maximizing the performance of people on their team, the conversations are often long an circuitous in getting there. Some managers interpret this differently. “In […]
“Water, Water Everywhere…..”
In the Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes, “Water water everywhere Nor a drop to drink.” Sometimes, I think there is a sales version of this, “Information, information everywhere, But we struggle so to think….” The amount of information and data available to each of us is overwhelming. There are thousands of blogs/articles/eBooks/white papers on sales and marketing. Any aspect of professional (and even unprofessional selling) is covered in any number of articles. Yet, too many consistently do what they have always done, even though it isn’t working as well. Rather than analyzing what works/what doesn’t too […]
The Problem With Dashboards/Metrics
We all have our dashboards and key indicators. We assess performance base on dial, meters, red/green/yellow lights. We sit at our desks going through mind numbing screens measuring everything that’s going on. We labor extensively over Excel spreadsheets, doing analysis, building formulas, pivot tables, slicing and dicing data in many ways. We use these tools to identify challenge, problems, opportunities. For example, win rates may be down, pipelines may be anemic, prospecting activity is down, sales cycles are increasing, average transaction values are declining, retention/renewals aren’t hitting target, onboarding ramp time is too long. The data helps us isolate problem […]
The More We Know, The Less We Think We Know
I’ve been having a fascinating discussion with Charlie Green, Jill Konrath, and Andy Paul on something known as the Kruger-Dunning effect. It’s a fascinating piece of research, published in 1999. Here’s a short description of it: “People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.” In plainer English, […]
No (Wo)Man Is An Island
John Donne penned a famous poem, No Man Is An Island, as part of his Devotions on Emergent Occasions. Even in 1624, apparently there were problems with silo’s, self centeredness, and what the behaviors/mentalities that result. We tend to focus on ourselves, our jobs/goals/responsibilities. Whether we are a customer or whether we are in roles that serve customers, we tend to think of ourselves. Yet none of us exist in isolation. Our work is part of a continuum of work that enables our organizations to grow and achieve the overall objectives. We depend on others in order to get our […]
“Focus On Activity More Than Results”
It’s clear that activity drives results—or at least it should. We all know that orders and revenue is a trailing metric. The danger of focusing on end results is that by the time you can report them, it’s too late to do anything about it. If you focus only on making the number, at the end of the month, quarter, year, you’ve missed it, there are no do overs. You can only look to recovering in future periods–but then it’s too late, you’ve missed your goal. As a result, we want to find the leading indicators/activities that produce the results […]