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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
Committing To Goal Or Engaging In Wishful Thinking?
I really don’t mean this to be a New Year’s resolution piece, though the title may sound like it. I really wanted to focus a discussion commitment—-commitment to change, commitment to achieving a goal, commitment to execution, commitment to doing something and seeing it through. Since it is the New Year, both organizationally and individually, we have new plans, strategies and goals. They may be expressed in terms of quotas, revenue, profit goals. They may be new initiatives or new programs. In some organizations, the process for establishing these actually started back in August or September. There’s something about the […]
In Solving Problems, Are You Focused On The Headpin?
Sales managers have to balance a number of, potentially contradictory, issues in leading their organizations and maximizing productivity and results. Combine that with the fact that the organization must continue to move forward producing results. In business and sales, there are no time outs. No chances to stop the world and spend time just focusing on solving problems. Someone once said that it’s like changing a tire on a car going 200 miles per hour. I get calls from great managers, all with the same questions, which problems should I focus on first, how many can I attack at one […]
Getting It Done Versus Doing It Right
I saw a comment by Alex Shootman of Eloqua at Focus this morning. He spoke of their performance management system in which they looked at performance across a couple of dimensions, Getting It Done and Doing It Right. I really liked his comment, but wanted to address it in a much broader sense. Getting it done is pragmatic, it has a sense of urgency to it. It keeps us moving forward and progressing. However, too often, we focus on the expedient–just get it done! Each of us is in a time pressured world. We have too much to do with […]
“Take Part” In Your Own Personal And Career Development
Year end and the New Year are always times to catch up with friends and colleagues. I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people–some I haven’t spoken to for too long a time. I also got a number of emails from followers and other colleagues. There were a couple of interrelated themes that came up over and over. The first is general optimism–not only about the economy, but their companies prospects and their own personal growth. For the first time in several years, I am seeing people optimistic about their own futures. It’s a dramatic shift from […]
Why Do We Reserve Moments Of Reflection And Renewal To The New Year?
The New Year is an interesting time. It’s time when everything seems to be re-set. We have new goals and objectives. We resolve to change things, to do things differently. Somehow, we all start the New Year with a clean slate, whatever happened last year is in the past, things are new and fresh. Things start out great, we’re focused, energized, excited. We do seem to change things, we get some great new initiatives going, we get some great traction. Too soon, life happens again, we get caught up in the momentum of every day events. Over time, our best […]
A Good Salesperson Can Sell Anything
I was having coffee with the COO of a large organization a few weeks ago. We were talking about selling and the characteristics of great sales people. He made the statement, “A great salesperson can sell anything.” I reflected on his statement, replying “I’m a pretty good salesperson—I’m really great at very large complex deals, but I’m not sure I could sell anything.” He replied, “You’re far too modest, I know you can be great selling anything—selling is in your blood.” Since our conversation, I’ve thought about the topic a lot, can a great sales person sell anything? I suppose […]