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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
“A Little Knowledge……”
We have tools and data sources that gives us all kinds of information and data. We can know about the issues our customers and their markets face. We can know about performance challenges. We have information about individuals, pulled from their social profiles and activity. We have an abundance of data, information, knowledge, but we struggle to make use of it. Or we apply it inappropriately, exacerbating the challenges we are trying to address. We, and our customers, are sometimes overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information. We struggle through understanding what is important, what is accurate, how we make […]
Let’s Talk About Lean Manufacturing For A Moment….
So much of what our focus in “modern selling,” seems to be the adaptation of Lean Manufacturing techniques into selling. We’ve created “assembly lines” with specialized functions, passing our customers from one station to the next. All our focus is on efficiency, eliminating any wasted effort–either through not doing it, or through automation of the tasks. But somehow, we’ve missed some very important principles in Lean Manufacturing. They are the fundamentals that make this so important in making lean manufacturing work. One of the fundamental principles is “Elimination of Waste.” This can be interpreted in a variety of ways–wasted motion, […]
“Show Your Work….”
I had a restless night with some recurring dreams/nightmares. While it’s been decades since I was in high school and college, I still remember tests and final exams, where we were instructed to “Show your work.” At the time, I remember always being annoyed. “Why can’t I just give you the answer? How much work do I need to show? It’s going to take me such a long time to write all this out….” I, also, suspected showing my google query (which is actually how I got the answers in later years) would be unsatisfactory. At the time, it made […]
Becoming Efficiently Ineffective
Selling has an obsession with efficiency! We want to eliminate any wasted time. We want to eliminate wasted efforts. We want to automate as much as we can. All this done in service of freeing up time to focus on the tasks that cannot be automated. We have been doing this for years, leveraging new processes and methodologies, segmenting and specializing jobs, providing layers of technology (which, inadvertently, provide huge diversions from our core responsibilities). We are embracing AI, mostly not because it can help us be better, but because it helps us become more efficient. And in all this […]
We’ve Got Productivity All Wrong!
The brilliant Matt Heinz provoked me with his post about productivity. As I often do, I went to the dictionary. Some of what I found: When we talk about workplace productivity, we are referring largely to how much work is accomplished in a particular work environment, over a particular period of time. When a business is fully operational and functioning at capacity, productivity should, in theory, be maximized. Productivity is defined as the ratio of output to input. For example, productivity can be measured as the ratio of total output to hours worked. Yield is a measure of land productivity. […]
Selling In Tough Times….
“Tough times demand tougher selling!” That seems to be a mantra many people discuss about selling in a difficult economy. And tougher selling is, sometimes, interpreted of higher activity levels, more outreaches, higher volumes, more and more frequent touches. Some of it focuses on more aggressive messaging. Some of it focuses on strengthening value propositions, finding ways to increase the value customers might realize through a change effort. But buyers are getting tougher too! What they will buy, what they can buy will be very focused. They will not respond to anything that is not mandatory or critical to their […]