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
Do You Have The Right People On The Bus?
Recently, I was discussing some of the key performance challenges too many organizations face. The executives I was speaking with spoke about all the investments they were making in sales enablement—tools, training, programs, content, etc. The results they were getting were OK–but not great. They seemed to be doing many of the right things, but these things weren’t moving the needle as expected. It’s a pretty common problem, despite our best efforts in training and equipping our people to perform, we just aren’t getting the results we expect or need. In fact, much of the data point to the opposite, […]
Digital Sales Transformation In A Customer First World
The Digitization Of Business impacts every business and virtually individual in the world. It’s this and the next decade’s industrial revolution. The digitization of business is not just about the application of technology to business, it’s really about deploying capabilities, solutions, engaging employees, customers, suppliers and communities in ways that have only been imagined in science fiction. Currently, we see only the tip of the iceberg of potential and already they are having amazing impacts in healthcare, financial services, retail, technology, transportation, consumer products and other sectors. As with the businesses we work for and with, Digitization will demand we […]
Do Customers Really Want A Frictionless Buying Experience?
It seems to be fashionable to talk about creating “frictionless buying experiences?” I suppose the concept draws readers, perhaps it’s an extreme expression of removing barriers to the customer buying process. But does the concept make sense? Is it what customers want? And if we looked at the concept of “friction in the buying process, what is the greatest source of friction? Long time readers will recognize when I ponder questions like this, sometimes I revert back to my background in physics. If I look at an object in motion in a frictionless environment, they become impossible to stop. it […]
Nuance, So Subtle, We Often Miss It
Nuance is important to our ability to connect with impact to our customers and our people. Yet, too often, we miss it, or completely ignore it. Let’s start with what nuance is: 1 :a subtle distinction or variation “Nuances of flavor and fragrance cannot be described accurately …” —Scott Seegers “… these terms have certain nuances of meaning …” —Ben F. Nelms 2 :a subtle quality :nicety “… the nuances of an individual’s voice …” —Michael Swaine 3 :sensibility to, awareness of, or ability to express delicate shadings (as of meaning, feeling, or value) Too often, we design our engagement […]
Whatever Happened To MBWA?
Decades ago, Tom Peters and Bob Waterman articulated the concept of MBWA–Management By Wandering Around in their classic book, In Search Of EXCELLENCE (Caps mine–EXCELLENCE must always be in caps!) The principle is that leaders must get away from their desks, their cloistered offices, and meeting rooms. They must wander through their organizations, meet their customers and suppliers. The reason this was/is important is that it’s so easy to get out of touch with what’s going on. If we aren’t wandering around, we don’t have a good sense of what’s happening. We don’t know what people’s views are, we don’t […]
It’s Not About What Or How We Sell…..
How we define a problem inevitably constrains our solutions to the problem. That’s why it’s so important to think about the problem we are trying to solve and defining it in a way that enables us to solve the problem in a meaningful way. As we address the issue, “How do we drive sales, how do we grow our business, how do we achieve our numbers,” depending on how we frame the issues/problems around revenue growth, we could be seriously constraining the solutions that are available to solve the problem. Most organizations frame the issue around, “What we sell.” Inevitably, […]