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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
If Our People Fail, We Have Failed As Managers
In our Future Selling Institute Office Hours last Friday, my friend, Jonathan Farrington, made a comment in a discussion about coaching. He said, as managers, if our people fail, we have failed as managers. It’s an important statement that deserves much more in the way of discussion. As managers, our job is to maximize the performance of our organizations and each individual within the organization. We do this through a number of mechanisms, including: We have strategies and tactics in place that clearly position us within our target markets and customers. We keep them current. We have processes, tools, training, […]
Isn’t Social Networking About Connecting With People?
I received an intriguing invitation to “connect” today. Best described, I was asked to connect with a “Thing,” Not a person. This thing had a relatively normal first name, but then a very gimmicky “phrase” as a last name. Curious, I looked the person up at LinkedIn. He went by the same name. I went to his website, likewise, he identified himself the same way. I had no sense of the person I was connecting with. I felt I was connecting with a “phrase,” not a real human being. Nothing in his site or profile gave me any indication of who […]
Why I Love Lazy Sales People!
I love lazy sales people! Actually, let me clarify, I love lazy sales people who consistently achieve their goals and objectives. Every organization has one or two of them, we know how to recognize them. They’re the folks that never seem to be in a hurry, they seem to have time on their hands. When management announces a new initiative, they probably whine and complain—but just the appropriate amount. They may occasionally blow off internal meetings, they may not do all the reporting that’s asked of them, they may do the minimum to skate by. They certainly never volunteer for […]
Sales Coaching, Dirty Secrets Or Misunderstanding What Coaching Is About?
I was interested in reading the Harvard Business Review post, The Dirty Secret Of Effective Sales Coaching. It’s an interesting article with many good point and you should read it. However, I think the authors present a very narrow view of the manager’s job and the goals of effective coaching. Many of the conclusions are pretty obvious, eliciting almost a “Duhhh” response. If you think about it, “coaching the middle” has a huge return. It should be obvious, there are more people in the middle, so every percent of performance improvement you get from this population has a great impact […]
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 […]