Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Improving Win Rates!
Win rates are critical to driving performance and achieving our goals. Win rates are critical to our understanding of our pipelines. We leverage them to help us understand whether we are working a sufficient volume high quality opportunities to achieve our goals. The higher our win rates, the more we shift the pipeline numbers in our favor. As a simple example, today, we settle for 15-20% win rates. Everything else being equal, and it seldom is, we need 5-6 times pipeline coverage to achieve our goals. Improving win rates to 30-40%, which usually is not that difficult, nor does it […]
What If Failure Was An Option?
We never, purposefully, set out to fail. But our fear of failure prevents us from learning, improving, and growing. This fear of failure, whether self or organizationally imposed, actually condemns us to more failures over time. We create all sorts of mantras, suggesting we don’t fear failure. “Fail fast, fail often!” “Fail forward.” “Move fast and break things.” Yet when we fail, we tend to punish those we perceive to have failed. We fire a person who hasn’t made their quota, we fail to look at why and what might be done to reverse it. We create structures and rules […]
“Where Do Your People Want To Be Taken?”
Ask yourself a question, “Are you taking your people where they want/need to be taken?” Too often, we tend to focus on where we need to go/what we want to accomplish, but we fail in engaging our people as effectively, taking them where they need to be taken. Recently, I’ve had a fascinating experience working with a very high potential CRO. He had never been in a leadership role, but now found himself in leading the selling team for a high growth start up. Our initial meetings were consumed with fire fighting. He had inherited some challenges, some bad commitments, […]
Moving To “Problem Solving”
We seem to be wired to react and respond. When we encounter a problem, we immediately jump on it doing what we can do to correct it, getting back on course. It seems like a game of business/selling “whack a mole.” A problem pops up here, we put a fix in place, another one appears somewhere else, we fix that, another pops up….. We move from problem to problem, “whacking” them, only to have more pop up elsewhere. And, too often, the things we thought we solved pop up again. We end up going in circles, forever, solving and re-solving […]
The Pursuit Of Easy……
Continuous improvement is critical to our ability to grow, both as individuals and organizations. Whether it’s to drive higher levels of productivity/performance, responding to changes in our customers or markets, addressing new opportunities, or anything else. We have to constantly be assessing what we do, who we do it to/with, how and why we do these things—and how we improve and do more. It’s easy to fill our days with activities, but activities with an express focus and goal are different. It’s easy to continue doing those activities because the goal becomes the activity, not how the activity contributes to […]
Long Term Effectiveness Requires Short Term Inefficiency!
In a world driven by efficiency, it’s heresy to advocate anything but getting more done in less time. For years, we’ve been obsessed with efficiency. We’ve restructured workflows, leveraging factory models to improve the efficiency at every sales workstation. We implemented processes, methodologies, and technologies that enable us to complete more activities in less time. And, now, AI/LLMs enable us to amplify those activities endlessly. This might be great if all these highly efficient activities were the outcomes expected. But they aren’t, while our efficiency is skyrocketing, the number of activities we can execute in any period of time is […]