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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
The Problem With “Account Planning”
Somehow, the New Year is “Account Planning Season.” Possibly, last quarter, you were asked to develop your account plan, but certainly in the next month or so, you will be asked to develop and present your account plan. Usually, we pull out last year’s presentation. We blow off the digital dust, update it with what we did last year, we add the new numbers for this year, identify enough initiatives to keep management off our backs. Then we put it away for next year’s exercise and get on with our work. The first problem with account planning is we treat […]
“Fresh Starts”
Somehow, the New Year, particularly for sellers, represents a fresh start. Regardless of our performance in the past fiscal year, we start the New Year anew. If we blew away our quotas in 2023, pretty soon managers will be asking “What have you done lately?” If we missed our goals, that is all behind us, and we start anew. We may have set a few resolutions for the New Year. Things we might do better. Inevitably, there will be SKOs–inspirational messages, new goals/strategies/initiatives, and training. There will be brief celebrations of what was accomplished last year, and cheerleading for the […]
Personalization Is, Well…….Personal…..
It’s year end, people are reaching out, through all channels, with connection requests, meeting requests to sell me something, everything you can imagine. And, as you might expect, everyone has “personalized” their outreach. Somehow, though it should be no surprise, they are remarkably impersonal. I’ve gotten used to ignoring those that are addressed to D.A. Brock, or refer to my company as Excellence or Excellenc.com. They clearly have no idea about me or the company, they have just harvested a list. There are those that say, “We’re in the same LinkedIn Group….” I spend no time in LinkedIn groups and […]
On Connections, Connecting, And Reconnecting ……
Yes, we’ve all come to despise connection requests. Our inboxes are filled with them, “I’m impressed by your profile….. We share common interests….. We’re in the same group….. We can get you leads….. I’d like to tell you about our products and how you can use them…. I worked for Estee Lauder and you’re cute (OK, we know about those)” Then there are those who wield their connections as weapons, alluding to “Mine is bigger than yours.” Some how the more connections they have, the more connected they think they are. Recently, I read a post recommending a number of […]
We Are Efficient, But Are We Effective?
Time is a problem. We never have enough. And regardless what we do, we never will. Whatever time we tend free up, is immediately filled with something else and we become time poor, once again. We have endless tools and technologies, increasingly assisted by AI, enabling us to accomplish more in each hour. The goal of each of these is increasing our efficiency. If I think, for example, the evolution of “prospecting letters.” I started in sales, about 5 years before emailing became popularized. To send a prospecting letter, I had to write it in longhand and give it to […]
Customers Need Help, But Do We Want To Be Helpful?
Just finished a fascinating discussion with my good friend, Charles Green, and my new friend, Miles Veth. As our conversations often go, we were talking about the state of selling and how we improve. The conversation got me thinking about the issue: “Our customers desperately need help, but do we want to be helpful, do we know how to be helpful? We, everyone, face worlds of accelerating turbulence, disruption, risk, and uncertainty. We face issues we may not have experienced before. We are, often, so busy we may not recognize threats or opportunities to change, improve grow. And when we […]