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
“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 […]
Whose Job Is It To Understand The Buyers?
George Bronten just published a fascinating post, “Your Sales Enablement Will Fail Without These 5 Things.” I agree with him on at least 3 of the 5, and kind of sorta, but not quite agree on the 2 remaining items. But his first critical success factor really struck me, Understand Your Buyers. I absolutely agree with this–but thought, is this sufficient? In some sense, sales is like the tail wagging the dog. We need to understand our buyers intimately, in order to engage them, and sell our solutions. But the issue of understanding the customer really has to go back […]
COUNTER Mentor Leadership–A Great Read
I’m inundated with requests to preview and review books. Unfortunately, there are just too many out there, many that are relatively unspectacular. As a result, I focus on a few, high quality books. Several months ago, Kelly Riggs asked me to take a look at Counter Mentor Leadership. I reviewed the early draft, written by Kelly and his son, Robby. Several things resonated with me! It’s a straightforward, no nonsense book. There aren’t any claims of magic, no “Easy” buttons, no miracle techniques. We’ve seen too many, “get rich quick” books on leadership that only succeed in getting the author […]