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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
Performance Improvement — Looking In The Mirror First!
I get a lot of calls and notes from people genuinely interested in performance improvement. Often, it’s managers saying, “My team isn’t doing what they need to be doing,” or “This one person isn’t really cutting it.” Sometimes, it’s from sales people saying, “I know I could do better, but my [insert company, manager, CRM, tools, lack of training, even customers] are holding me back.” It’s human nature to look at the barriers to performance improvement as external. We tend to think, “If only these weren’t in my way, I could do fantastic.” I’m not talking about the chronic whiners or […]
We’re Efficient, But What Does That Do To The Customer Experience?
The other day, Jim Keenan and I were chatting about a number of things (mostly my envy of his upcoming ski vacation at “Bump School.”) We started talking about productivity tools—some that each of us were using and some errors we see customers making. After our conversation, I started reflecting on the unintended consequences of many of our efficiency initiatives. Before I go further, let me be clear, I think effectiveness and efficiency are critical. Our efficiency initiatives must complement and reinforce our effectiveness initiatives—and that’s often where things start going a little crazy. Too often, it seems our strives for […]
Stop Reading Books/Blogs On Selling!
Before many of my friends who’ve written quite outstanding books/blogs on Selling get up in arms, let me re-phrase this, “Stop reading ONLY books/blogs on selling!” Also, selfishly, I want more and more folks to be reading this blog – so please don’t stop. There are a lot of great books on sales and marketing. Right now, I’m reviewing about 15 books that are either just published or soon to be published. I always find something new in each of them–perhaps it’s a different twist on something I already knew, perhaps it’s a tidbit in an area that I’m not really knowledgeable […]
“Checking In,” Is Not A Next Step!
For those of you that know me, this won’t be a stunning confession, but I really struggle with my impatience. I try to rein it in–I’ve stopped tapping my pen, incessantly, on tables in meetings (though my legs are bouncing up and down under the table). I’ve learned to count to 10–well maybe 100, before jumping in on a review. But my tolerance level for waiting is virtually non-existent. So in deal reviews and pipeline reviews, it’s not unusual for me to interrupt, cutting to the chase, asking “What’s next, when will it happen?” It seems an obvious question and critical […]
“Turtles Only Make Progress When They Stick Their Necks Out*”
We often wonder why we aren’t making progress. Our results aren’t improving, we don’t seem to be growing. We may be doing OK, but we aren’t doing great, we just get by. If we really want to excel, if we want to outperform others, we have to take risks, we have to do things we’ve not done before, we have to make mistakes. So much of our business and sales culture goes against this. We don’t try new things because we don’t want to make mistakes. We want to control everything that we do–organizationally or individually, so we script things out–requiring […]
Financial Literacy—Critical For Sales
Financial literacy is critical for sales success. We have to be able to understand the numbers. We have to be able to understand the impact of our solutions on the customer–presenting the impact in financial terms. Yet I’m constantly amazed by the lack of basic financial literacy among sales professionals. There are little hints in all sorts of conversations: “The ROI on this deal is 7 months.” ROI is always expressed as a percent, Payback is expressed in months/years. Or sales people are troubled by the lack of CAPEX budget, yet they never look at financing alternatives to take advantage of OPEX spending. (If […]