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
How Is Your Time Being Spent?
“Time available for selling” is plummeting. Several years ago, we assessed how sales people for a very large client were spending their time. Both they and we were shocked with the results, less than 20% of their time was being spent directly on customer related activities. Let me sharpen that definition a little, primarily so you can see the magnitude of the challenge sales people face. In this survey, we defined “customer related activities” as time spent preparing for a meeting with the customer (phone or face to face), the actual time spent in the meeting, and the time spent […]
The Secret To Sales Success!
Our company works with a lot of organizations ranging from the world’s largest to start-ups. We also coach a lot of individuals. While each engagement is very different, at there core there’s one common theme, they are trying to discover the secret to success. Clients may be looking at how to raise sales performance, how/what products to bring to market, how to grow/expand/improve, how to beat the competition, how to establish market leadership. While many consultants tend to wrap a lot of fancy studies, analysis and stuff around the projects, perhaps to justify outrageous fees. The secret to sales success, […]
The Engaged Leader
I read a fascinating post by Patrick Lencioni, entitled, Micromanagement Is Underrated. It’s a must read post! No one likes working for a micromanager. No leader likes being accused of micromanagement. As a result, there is the phenomenon Lencioni describes as Management Abdication. Where managers, out of fear of being micromanagers, back off, ultimately becoming disengaged. To be honest, I think there are a lot of reasons managers are disengaged, this is just one. There’s a huge amount that can be written about abdication management, but instead, I’d like to focus on the differences in micromanagement and the engaged manager. […]
Connecting The Dots, Strategy And Execution
I’m sure I’m trying the patience of a number of people in a client organization. We’re establishing the key strategies, priorities, goals/metrics for the coming fiscal year. The CEO is very clear about what he wants to accomplish–though I had to wrestle him down to focusing on the top two. It was a great exercise for he and a few of his top executives. But after some reflection and debate, as well as some reshaping and redefinition of some of their strategies, he was able to identify the top two things, then started identifying the strategies beneath these top 2 […]
Skilled Adaptation Or Clueless Reactions?
To the casual observer, the fluidity with which a top performer adapts to a challenge may be hard to distinguish from the clueless reactions of poor performers. Both seem to be “rolling with the punches.” As the customer shifts, both the top performer and the clueless performer shift–but in very different, often subtle ways. The clueless performer simply reacts. The customer does something, the clueless performer reacts and responds. This may provoke other actions from the customer, to which the clueless performer responds. This back and forth process continues until the customer is bored and tells the clueless performer to […]
Change Sucks!
Change sucks, particularly when it’s inflicted on us. Often, don’t understand what’s going on, why, what it means to what we should be doing. We’re asked to do new things, sometimes things we don’t know how to do, sometimes things we don’t like to do or want to do. The natural tendency is to resist. To go back to what you were comfortable with doing in the past. To complain to management and complain about management. Sometimes, we think, “This too will pass,” so we ignore things, keep our heads down, do what we always did, and hope we can […]