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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 Your Bell Curve Look Like?
We tend to think about organizational performance in terms of “bell curves” or some sort of distribution curve. The typical bell curve looks something like this: The performance of our people is on the X (horizontal) axis, the number of our people is on the Y (vertical) axis. The bell curve typically has us thinking that we have a small number of high performers (the far right side of the curve) and a small number of poor performers (the left side of the curve) and the bulk of our people are medium performers. We may segment the bell curve to […]
2018 Sales Management Critical Issues, Part 1
I’ll be doing a short series of posts on critical issues facing sales managers in 2018. Before going further, for those of you who have followed me for some time, these issues are no different than critical issues of prior years. But I’m seeing many of them achieving critical mass in terms of awareness and commitment to fix. Many might say, the critical issue is the same as it ha always been, making our numbers. Actually, making our numbers is the outcome of addressing the critical issues that drive our ability to achieve the numbers. The first critical issue I’ll […]
“My Outlook Is Money, And Money Is Money!”
My friend Keenan was on one of his rants on LinkedIn. This particular rant was on really bad prospecting through LinkedIn. It generate a huge amount of conversation (Jim, I would have chosen a different shirt 😉 ) I was struck by a number of comments arguing against Jim, basically saying anything goes. One leaped out to me from a woman stating, “My outlook is money, and money is money!” I was stunned by that statement, but in reality, I suspect far too many sales people hold that view, but don’t express it. There’s no telling whether this individual is […]
“Old School Prospecting”
I’ve been working with a fascinating new client. We’ve been looking at how to improve their prospecting results. It’s been a fascinating project, in some sense, I may be learning more from them than they have from me–but they seem excited about the changes we are introducing. First, a little background. They wouldn’t be offended, but what they sell is about the furthest thing from being mission critical that one can imagine. Companies won’t grow their revenue as a result of buying their products. They won’t increase their market share, they won’t grow faster. There will be some cost improvement, […]
“Servant Salespersonship”
Some of the more cynical (or perhaps worn down) of you will misread the title, thinking, “Dave, we’re already slaves to our jobs, managers, companies. What are you doing?” I’m really thinking about applying the principles and concepts of “Servant Leadership” to sales and our relationships with customers. Servant leadership concepts can be traced back millennia to philosophies in from Lao-Tzu, the Indian treatise, Arhashastra, the Bible, many of the Stoics, and others. The modern incarnation of these principles were first popularized by Robert Greenleaf in “The Servant As A Leader,” published in 1970. Lots has been written about these […]
Predictions For 2017!
Foreword: Yes, you read the title right. I originally wrote this on December 30, 2016. I never published it. Somehow it seemed a little futile. As I started thinking about this topic for 2018, I looked at this article. As I had guessed one year ago, not much has changed. The state of sales and marketing hasn’t changed. The topics that were “hot” a year ago, or more, are the same topics we are struggling with now, and will be the topics we will struggle with in the coming years. Blog post for December 31, 2016: It’s that time […]