Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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.
Anyone entering into selling immediately sees the obsession we have with numbers. We are focused on hitting our revenue goals, not just by the end of the year, but quarterly and monthly. Recognizing revenue is a trailing metric, we become obsessed with things that tell us whether we will achieve those goals. We become obsessed with forecasts, pipelines, and their health. And that drives us to look at our prospecting and activity metrics. How many emails, how many calls, how many meetings, how many demos how many proposals, how many bathroom breaks………. And the gurus reinforce and intensify this. They […]
Read More“If you can’t do it yourself, you probably shouldn’t be using AI!” This was a brilliant observation by James Pursey in an outstanding seminar on AI in sales. The only modification I would make would be to say, “If you can’t do it excellently yourself, you probably shouldn’t be using AI!” James gets at the root of so many of the issues we see about the terrible use of LLMs in selling, marketing, customer service. We all have been the subject of the most horrible LLM generated emails, social media conversations, AI generated posts. Many have fallen victim to misstatements/hallucinations […]
Read MoreOne of the biggest mistakes I see too many managers make, is they dive in and start doing their people’s jobs. The motivations for this range from being well intended to malicious. We have all seen the managers believing they are the best sales people in the world, sweeping their people aside, playing “Superseller” in important customer calls. We see managers impatient with their people saying, “I can get this done faster….” We see well intended managers saying, “This is new, something we’ve never done before, I can probably get it done better than the people responsible for getting it […]
Read MoreI recently wrote an updated version of “What Is Coaching?” In it, I focused on how leaders coach and develop their people. At the end of the article, I had and Afterword, suggesting the same principles used in high impact coaching within our own organizations should be applied in working with our customers. I want to do a deeper dive in this article. Rather than repeat all the things about what coaching is and isn’t, how we effectively coach, I’ll summarize three key areas here, but for the details go back to the What is Coaching article: When we look […]
Read MoreIt seems the word “Coaching” has become one of those fashionable words, permeating every discussion. Go back 15 or more years, and we barely saw the word coaching. Today, we find coaching applying to about everything we do, both in business and in our personal lives. We see Executive Coaching, Career Coaching, Life Coaching, Performance Coaching, Business Coaching, Health/Wellness Coaching, Agile/Team Coaching, Sales Coaching, Spiritual Coaching, Dietary Coaching, and on an on and on. Endless “influencers” in social media claim to be providing coaching, where all they are really doing is broadcasting. There is the concept of coaching for virtually […]
Read More“Behind every business objective is the fulfillment of a personal objective.”* In our discovery process, if we conduct a discovery, we seek to understand the customers’ business objectives. “What problem are they solving, why is it important to solve it, what are the risks of solving/not solving it…….” And we focus the presentation of our solutions in terms of how it addresses the business objectives. Perhaps it’s a value proposition, an ROI, or something else. But underlying those business reasons, basically those things that impact their function and the work they do are personal objectives. It may be as simple […]
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