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 Did You Arrive At This Perception Of Our Solution?
It used to be that sales people were the principal source of information about products and solutions for customers. We spent a lot of time educating our customers about the capabilities of our products, company, and value of our solutions. There weren’t many other easy sources of information for customers to learn about our products or the alternatives. They could look at analyst reports–that is if analysts covered our products, they might find a current user–but that was probably a reference we gave them, they’d certainly get views from our competitors, but in all this the sales person was the […]
Do You Really Want To Sell?
Do you really want to sell? This may seem an odd question–since presumably many of the readers are sales professionals. But over the past few months, I’ve been observing something that is both interesting and a little confusing. I speak with thousands of people involved with selling and business development every year. Most really want the outcomes that come from selling–they want new deals, they want the commissions, bonuses, recognition that’s part of selling. They revel in the feel of winning the deal. At every event or meeting, I hear of great accomplishments and get involved in many conversations […]
In Winning, It’s The Little Performance Differences That Count
For those of you who have followed me for some time, you know I’m an avid bicyclist. Over the past weeks, I’ve been watching some of my favorite bicycling events. These are events–usually at least a week long, mostly several weeks. Typically, more than 100 riders may cover up to 2000 miles over the race. It may be surprising, but the margin of victory for these long distances and weeks of riding is extraordinarily small. In the recent Tour de California, Chris Horner beat Levi Leipheimer by 38 seconds–0.04%. The difference between Chris’s performance and the 5th place rider was […]
Sales Intelligence–It’s About Connecting The Dots
OK, before I start, let’s get all the comments about Sales Intelligence being an oxymoron out of the way. Actually sales intelligence is critical, there’s an interesting conversation about this at Focus.com, you should weigh in with your views. I think too many people get sales intelligence wrong–too many focus on the data. Effective sales intelligence is really about the questions—it’s about the insight we are trying to gather, the models we are trying to test, the assumptions or alternatives we want to consider. Data–information is meaningless, unless, we have a context in which to interpret that information. If we […]
Mistakes New Managers Make
Transitioning from the role of individual contributor to a freshly minted New Manager is fraught with opportunities to make mistakes. In this article, I just want to focus just three things, I’ve seen happen to new managers too often: Failure to recognize their job has changed! The urge to change everything at once. Getting stuck behind a desk! Failure to recognize their job has changed—this is usually the single biggest mistake I see new managers making. Typically, they’ve been very successful as individual contributors, possibly top performers. Too often, in moving to the manager role, they try to do the […]
The First 90 Days–Critical To Management Success
The first 90 days in any job is critical to your success. What you accomplish in your first 90 days sets the pattern for you and the organization over a much longer period. Everyone knows this, unfortunately, too many squander the opportunity to have their greatest impact by acting too soon. There’s this funny thing that happens to someone new into a management or leadership role. There is the urge to take action immediately, to put your stamp on the organization, to bend the organization to your direction. This is almost always a path to failure–both individually and for the […]