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
What’s Different About Account Based Marketing/Selling?
Account Based Marketing/Selling is all the rage today. if you haven’t jumped on that bandwagon, you clearly aren’t one of the cool kids. But having played in this space for more than a few years, a lot of what I see is deja-vu all over again, echoing concepts from the 80’s, 90’s, even before (look at some of the original books on account based selling and when they were published. There are some differences in ABM/ABS–ironically, very few people talk about them, except some of those grizzled veterans who have lived this through their careers. It seems marketers in ABM […]
On Professionalism
How would you feel if you walked into a dentist’s office, and everyone in the office had terrible/rotting teeth? Would you hire a contractor whose tools are rusted or broken? Or a landscaper whose yard was filled with weeds and dead plants? Would you eat at a restaurant that is filthy and has rat traps in the corners? How we present ourselves is important to building credibility, confidence, and trust with our customers. Yet I’m amazed at the number of sales people (note, I didn’t use the term “professional”) that present themselves poorly. I’m not speaking of how one dresses, […]
“Active Listening” Is Not A Technique
Catching up on my reading, I ran across an article on Active Listening. It was focused on sales people and the author made the statement, “Active listening makes them feel like they are being heard…..” I’m sure that’s not what the author intended to communicate, but it got me thinking about many other things I hear and read about active listening. Active listening–at least true active listening is not a technique. We know some of the things we do in active listening–playing back what the individual is saying, mirroring, probing/questioning. These are all very important and very helpful in understanding. […]
Making A Difference, Thinking Of Others
In December, I launched my 2017/2018 Charity Water campaign. I set the goal to hit $7500, I’ll be matching up to $2500, so we have the opportunity to raise $10,000. We already have about $4K, Thanks to everyone who has supported and contributed to this program! It really makes a difference. I’d love to have others join and contribute at Charity:Water. This campaign will bring total contributions, since I started, close to $60,000. Whenever I run this campaign, I have so many people reaching out to me, sharing their passions and the organizations they support with their time and money. […]
Why Would We Ever Do Anything Outside Our ICP?
I just read a good article on ABM, ABS, ABE (Account Based Marketing, Sales, Everything). It was well written and provided good advice on how to be more focused and effective in these areas. Here’s the link. In every article I read on the topic, one of the first things that comes up with ABM/S/E is focusing on your ICP–Ideal Customer Profile. I agree 200%! My issue is, why do we seem to limit this to ABM/S/E? Everything we do in sales and marketing, by definition, must focus on our ICP! Why would we waste time, money, and resources chasing […]
Micro Improvements, A Progress Report
Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve become very interested in the concept of Micro Improvements. I’ve written about the concepts in these posts: Plateauing and The Importance Of Small Changes In Improvng Performance. For the last couple of months, I’ve been using myself as a guinea pig in making micro improvements in my own performance. It’s been a fascinating journey–both in the improvements I’m seeing and what I am learning in the process. I thought I’d give a progress report. In one of those past posts, I mentioned I have implemented an adaptation of the questions Marshall […]