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
What Value Are You Creating For Your People?
Some managers reading this title will be thinking, “Dave, you’ve got this backwards, they’re our people, our employees, they work for us. They need to be creating value for us. That’s what we hire them for, to bring in orders!” It’s this very attitude that creates the challenges we have within too many of our organizations today. Our jobs as leaders is to maximize the performance of each person on our teams. It’s about enabling them and empowering them to do the jobs we hired them for and to produce the results expected. And it’s getting out of their way […]
Short-Cuts Always Come Up Short
Under pressure, it’s human nature to take short-cuts. We have the tendency to consciously choose the expedient over what we know to be right. We don’t have enough deals in our pipelines, we need to find more deals. Under pressure, we relax our qualification criteria, we cast a wider net, looking far outside our sweet spots. Sure we achieve the objective of getting more in our pipeline, in the short term. But the quality of our pipeline had suffered in the process. Our probability of winning plummets, we have to spend more time on flaky deals, rather than focusing on […]
What Does Greatness Look Like?
In meeting with individual and executives, I often hear, “I/We want to be great (or even good).” It’s often expressed: “I want to be a great sales person!” “I want to be a great sales leader!” “I want to have a great sales team!’ “I want this sales/call meeting to go great!” “I want to do great deals!” The concept and aspiration can be applied to virtually anything we do, down to the most minute level–a great email prospecting campaign. After people describe this, I ask, “What does greatness look like?” Most of the time people look at me cross-eyed, […]
#MyFirstSevenJobs John Pesec and Chris Palmisano
A number of weeks ago, I started following some posts about people’s First Seven Jobs. It was fun and fascinating to see the very first jobs people held. There’s a diverse selection of people’s first seven jobs here, Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, and Keenan. I jumped onto the bandwagon with my first 7 jobs. In the comments, you can also see Hank Barnes‘ first seven. It’s actually a huge amount of fun–first thinking about your own, reflecting on what they meant to you (privately) and seeing others’ experience. Consequently, I’ve invited a huge number of people of diverse backgrounds, ages, […]
The No A**hole Rule
Almost 10 years ago, Bob Sutton published the “No A**hole Rule.” For some reason, I’ve been contemplating this quite a bit. I think it’s something both sales people and consultants run a danger of becoming or are accused of. What is being an A**hole? Clearly, there are behaviors and attitudes that are inappropriate. Often they arise from being too “Self” centered. Perhaps an overpowering sense of self-importance, or focus on “what’s in it for me.” Characteristics of this might be not listening, not being open to new ideas, not being willing to consider other positions or even to shift your […]
Get Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable
There’s a lot of “wisdom” around phrases like “Get into your (comfort) zone…..” Presumably, it’s about getting into a good routine, building a rhythm or cadence, replicating what you’ve done to be successful. We hear and read variations of this all the time. Advice that’s well intended but perhaps the most dangerous advice we could follow. The moment we start seeking comfort or to be comfortable, we start to lose. We stop learning, we stop improving, we begin to settle for mediocrity. My friend, Mark Modesti, say, “We don’t know our own capabilities until we stretch them by doing something […]