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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
Top Performers: Obsessive Learning And Relentless Execution
At one point, I wanted to get better at golf (it’s hard to be worse than I am). I started reading a lot of “How To” books, watching videos, and taking lessons. As I stood, club in hand, looking down at the ball, I struggled to remember: “Keep your head down, bend your knees, keep evenly balanced, keep your back straight, shoulders level, reach straight back, keep your arm straight, watch your elbow……” I’d always end up twisted like a pretzel, the ball would go further to the left or right than in front of me. Sometimes, I think people […]
Attrition Is A Leadership Problem
Some time ago, I wrote, A Frightening Look At The “Cost Of Selling.” It has been one of the most widely read posts I’ve ever written, with 10’s of thousands of views and 100’s of tweets. The post generated lots of discussion and comments about the challenges of recruiting, hiring, onboarding, performance management, development planning. There’s been lots of discussion about attrition–voluntary and involuntary. Along with this has been some discussion of millennials–saying, “They will always be moving to other jobs…..” Many in comments and in other articles take this as a fact, but don’t look at the underlying issues […]
Presence
Often when we think about “Presence,” we think about a person’s bearing or how they present themselves. There are some people who seem to have tremendous presence. When they walk into a room, when the participate in a conversation, all focus shifts to them. There’s a lot to be said for this kind of presence–but I think most of the time it has to do with a different sense of presence. The part of presence that we don’t seem to pay much attention to, is “being present.” That is being totally focused on what’s happening now, being in the moment, […]
Too Busy To Worry About The Customer Experience
Recently, I wrote, “‘Simplifying The Way We Work,’ But What About The Customer?” It provoked some interesting discussion, including a great comment from Gary Hart: “…do you think many organizations are trapped in the misconception that bottom-line-centric improves customer centricity and that price trumps service?” Certainly, the bottom-line is critical to our success. Without focusing on profitability, we can’t continue to invest in growth or survive. It’s a fundamental for all businesses. But customer centricity and profitability aren’t conflicting goals. In fact our most loyal customers are probably our most profitable customers. I do think many business executives, mistakenly, put profit […]
“Simplifying The Way We Work,” But What About The Customer?
I caught a small article flashing across my news feeds, “Coca-Cola Disconnects Voicemail At Headquarters.” I’m not a big fan of voicemail, those I receive are translated into texts and sent to my mobile and email. So this post is not about voicemail. The thing that struck me in the article the reasoning behind this. The article cited an internal memo from the CIO, the change was not done for cost savings, but rather “’to simplify the way we work and increase productivity.’ Callers, upon not reaching the person they are trying to reach are told to try later or […]
The Illusion Of Control
Matt Heinz wrote a provocative post, “News Flash, Sales Doesn’t Control When The Deal Is Closed.” It is a great post. Many of us, in and out of sales, operate under the illusion that we are in control, but we aren’t. Many might respond, well the customer is in control, so we have to work with them. As Matt points out, this may not be true, the customer may not truly be in control of their buying/decision making process—which is a possible reason so many deals end in no decision made. If one pushes this argument further, we realize in […]