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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
References And Doing Your Homework
It was a dark and dreary night, suddenly the phone rang……… Actually, it was mid afternoon on a sunny Southern California day, but I’ve always wanted to start a blog post with that. As so often happens, when I’m in my office, a sales person called. The guy had a provocative opening, so I decided to listen, more out of curiosity than anything else. As a means of trying to establish his credibility with me, he kept dropping names of people and organizations that he thought would impress me. He rambled on for over a minute, never pausing for a reaction […]
Those Damn Customers Just Get In The Way Of Doing Business!
A friend called the other day. He’s a senior executive in the financial side of his company. He was clearly frustrated, saying, “Dave, I need your help! The people in this organization and many of the internal functions are killing us. They can’t stand the customers! They think everything would be great if it weren’t for those damned customers! How can I get them to understand — I mean really understand that customers are what keeps us in business?” I wish that was the first and only time I’ve heard this, sadly though, it’s all too common. Most people don’t […]
Your Customers Know What You Value, Do You?
My friend, Wally Bock, wrote an interesting newsletter last week on Bear Bryant. He ended it with a quote from Coach Bryant, “Can people watch you in action and tell what your value ares?” I thought about it for a moment, I think the answer is a definitive YES! 100% of the time! We live and work what we value every day–it’s impossible to hide them, at least on a sustained basis. Perhaps every once in a while we can suppress them and put on an act. So, the good news is that our values are visible to everyone, every […]
The Illusion Of Control
Let me confess, I’m a contol freak. It bothers me to think that “being in control” is an illusion. As sales people, business professionals, managers and leaders, we are always trying to control something. As sales people, we try to control the sales process—yet it’s the customer that is in control of their buying process. As managers, we may try to control our people—but we really never can control them. We have a reluctance to do something new–unless we can be in control. In reality, there is little we control–perhaps how we spend our time, our integrity, our values. (Sometimes […]
Performance Management Starts With Looking In The Mirror
Performance management is a hot issue. Sales leaders and business managers constantly strive to get the highest levels of performance from their people and teams. We coach, provide tools and systems, create processes, measure and reward. All of these are important, but I think we tend to overlook another important factor—our own performance. To maximize performance in the organization we have to first look at ourselves and how we perform. The personal example each of us sets as a leader is a starting point. It we expect our people to use the CRM system or our sales process, yet we […]
Let’s Put Marketing On Commission!
My friend, Dan McDade, President ofPointClear, has been leading an interesting discussion at Focus. He asked me the question, “would sales people be willing to share commissions with marketing if marketing was perceived to have done a better job for sales?” (it’s a good discussion, I recommend reading it.) My immediate reaction was, “Isn’t marketing’s job to be supporting sales? Why do we need to pay them some of sales’ commissions if they do their job well?” I still maintain that position, but Dan’s question started me thinking. What would happen if we put marketing on a commission plan, what […]