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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 The Difference Between “A” Players And Others? It’s All In The Details
I was having a conversation with a colleague about the differences between top performers and everyone else. The conversation caused me to reflect on discussions I’ve had with 1000’s of sales people over the past year. Clearly, there are differences in sales people and their approaches. The skills and competencies vary by market/industry, customer base, solutions, organizational strategies/priorities, geography/culture and many other things. Various assessments will tell you there are commonalities in top performers in certain behaviors, attitudes. For example, the ability to take rejection, money motivation, risk tolerance, and so forth. We see certain commonalities in those indicators across […]
If A “Fool With A Tool Is Still A Fool,” Why Do We Keep Giving Them Tools?
A colleague specializing in sales and marketing automation tools is fond of saying, “A fool with a tool is still a fool.” My variation of this is that often tools enable us to “Create crap at the speed of light.” Tools have a wonderful way of amplifying our capabilities. We can not only drive greater velocity, but also far greater volume and reach. In the hands of fools, tools enable us to not only execute poorly at very high velocity, but to spread the pain of that poor execution across a much broader range of victims, I mean prospects/customers. With […]
The Importance Of Small Changes In Improving Performance
Too often we think of performance and continuous improvement incorrectly. While we and our managers (who are trying to coach us) may be well intended and highly motivated, we set ourselves up for failure from the outset. One of the problems is we try to change too much. It’s kind of like some bad coaching I got on my golf swing. Rather than going to a professional and paying for coaching, I asked a friend who had a very low handicap advice me on my swing. He watched me at the driving range, then said, “Dave you have to do […]
What If We Start Designing Our Organizations For “A Players” Only?
All of us, me included, tend to think of our organizations as mixes of A, B, C players. Implicitly, we tend to believe that’s the way things are. We settle into routines about how we coach and improve each, at best, shifting the bell curve (or normal distribution curve) a little to the right. All the time wringing our hands about how we improve performance. But what would happen if we start designing our organizations to have only A players, or those that will become A players in a reasonable period of time? Why should we accept the idea that […]
We Don’t Drive Performance By “Grading On The Curve”
Recently, I wrote, “Behind Ever C Player, There’s A…….” One of my most astute readers made the comment, “If you rank on a curve, you have to have C players, who may also be great.” Mike is absolutely right, kind of…… With his permission, I’m going to tweak his comment a little beyond what he intended, but I think it’s an important discussion and distinction. Too often, we “grade on the curve.” We have a mentality around comparing performance of each person to the others on the team. There are some merits to this, however there are some flaws–which lead […]
“Behind Every C Player, There’s A ……..”
There’s the old saying, “Behind every great individual is a great [Insert spouse, partner, mom, dad, family, mentor].” Let’s update this for modern times, we could say, “Behind every C player, there’s a ……..” Hmmm, troubling, isn’t it? But be honest with yourselves. You’re reading this, no one is watching you, you can reflect, privately, on your own performances as leaders and managers. We have C players in our organizations, because we let them stay in the organization and we tolerate C performance. What’s this say about our own performance and leadership capabilities? If our job is to maximize the […]