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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
Unsmart, Stupid, Willfully Ignorant
I’ve been struggling with a lot of the “stuff” I see in my feeds. And, from time to time, conversations I have. And reflections on the “state of selling/business.” As I’ve been reflecting on it, I’ve asked a couple of close friends/colleagues. Are they seeing similar things? How would they describe it? The descriptions were all over the place. Terms like “Idiots, Such Stupidity, Anti-intellectual…..” I get what they are saying, but they weren’t quite capturing the behaviors I am trying to describe. For the time being, I’ve categorized so many of the behaviors in three ways: For the moment, […]
The Sales Process And Contextual Flexibility
I’ve been doing some work with a brilliant CRO. We’ve been reworking and implementing a revised selling/buying process. Their previous process was poorly defined, outdated, and people weren’t using it. As we are rolling this out, she is encountering resistance from her team: “My situations are all different! This is too rigid! This is too complicated and structured for me, just let me do my own thing! I don’t need no stinkin’ process, f**k off…..” (OK, I made the last one up, but I have encountered a lot of sellers thinking this.) I see the same excuses from too many […]
Doing The Work Or Going Through The Motions?
In the past few days, I’ve heard two fascinating things. At first, they seem very different, but when you think about them, the underlying issues are similar. The first was was a quote from Tom Mendoza on The Learn-It-All podcast, “Nothing great has ever been done by people that don’t want to do it!’ The second was in a conversation with Brent Adamson. He shared the story of a CRO at a SKO. “The secret to your competitive advantage is Mediocrity!” The CRO went on to explain how all their competitors were committed to mediocrity, so all it took to […]
A Further Note On Hyper-Efficiency, The Path To Ultimate Efficiency
I wrote, “Hyper-Efficiency, The Secret To Sales Success In 2025!” It’s generating interesting discussion, perhaps it’s the thoughtful image I created to illustrate the concept. Jim Barnet asked a fascinating question, I wanted to expand on it. Jim started to talk about it from the customer point of view (certainly a novel approach). As we continue to strive for hyper-efficiency, figuring out how we get more and more accomplished within a certain period of time, our customers are at least 2 steps ahead of us in their efficiency efforts. Perhaps, they have achieved “Ultimate Efficiency!” We continue to struggle to […]
What About Leadership?
There’s a lot of discussion about sales managers and leaders. We tend to conflate these concepts, using them interchangeably. In reality there is a wide chasm between leadership and management. And I have been guilty in conflating these terms–and this is sloppiness. I woke up to this, today, reading an article, proclaiming the death of sales managers. The author went through a huge number of things where AI or other things could do the majority of the job of sales managers. There were more errors in the list than correct assessments. One of the claims, AI will be a better […]
“Hyper-Efficiency, The Secret To Sales Success In 2025!”
I’m relieved to learn that all we need to do to be successful in 2025 is to become hyper-efficient! We still have 11 months to go, imagine how much we can accomplish. OK, OK, you know how deeply my tongue is planted in my cheek. For close to two decades, we’ve been driven by a scaling philosophy, stated differently, a volume, velocity approach to selling. We’ve developed all the math equations to support this philosophy, then adapted the basic strategy over time. The original volume velocity philosophy was very straight forward. Want to grow 100% in the coming year? The […]