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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
Do We Really Understand Performance Failure?
My feeds are filled with data and stories of selling failures. “Our people aren’t prospecting enough! They aren’t keeping healthy pipelines/funnels! They aren’t winning enough deals! They aren’t using the tools! They aren’t making quota!” It’s so easy to blame our people for bad sales performance, but are we assigning the responsibility correctly? Is the failure because of them, or are they failing for some other reason? It’s so easy to blame our people. After all, they are doing the work, they are the people directly accountable for producing results, and when they don’t produce them, it’s easy to point […]
The Importance Of Being “Stratical” Or “Tactegic”
Strategic thinking with most sales leaders seems to be focused on, “How are we going to finish the month?” For front line sales managers it seems to be limited to, “Did you hit your prospecting goals for today, what is your plan to do hit it tomorrow?” The intensity of focus on what we are doing to achieve our goals today blinds us to the fact that things are changing at a rate we have never experienced. As a result, we spend too much time playing catch up, unprepared to address the challenges and opportunities for the coming 1-3 years. […]
The Secret To Selling Success
After rigorous research and discussion with many expert colleagues, I’ve discovered the universal secret to Selling Success. Before getting into, it’s important to understand the methodology underlying the research. I did a rigorous scan of the literature, mostly the articles and discussions in my feed in LinkedIn. I assessed likes, comments, reposts the articles by the experts produced. Leveraging friends and colleagues who consult, I asked them what they were seeing with sales executives they work with. The responses tended to re-affirm the observations from my literature search. All totaled we have large, diverse sample sizes. Varying types of products/services, […]
Appreciating Appreciation…..
Appreciation is one of those “soft” topics that tough minded business people, focused on the numbers and growth, don’t tend to appreciate. In selling, I suspect too much of the mindset is, “When the going gets tough, the tough build more pipeline…..” Yet appreciation is integral to our success–both within our organizations, with our partners, and our customers. Appreciation has rich dimensions. It is critical in driving employee engagement. Organizations, where people feel they are heard and valued. Where they feel their managers are generally interested in them and their success. Engagement level is directly tied to organizational success and […]
Creating Demand……
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve found myself involved in a number of conversations about “Creating demand….” Some have focused on marketing’s role in demand creation. Depending on whether you are in marketing or sales, there are various views of how well this is being done. Almost universally, there seems to be a demand gen problem—it has become increasingly difficult to catch prospect/customer attention, regardless of the techniques we leverage for demand gen. Every channel for reaching and engaging them is overwhelmed. Most of it is bad quality, most of it is undifferentiated, poorly targeted. Our universal solution to […]
Just One Thing…
To say we live in a world of overwhelm, overload, volatility, constant change is an understatement. Burnout, exhaustion impacts everyone at all levels. There seem to be two dominant ways of handling this overwhelm. The first is hunkering down. Focusing on what has worked in the past, hoping that, “this too will pass.” In some sense, it’s true, it does pass, something else comes up, and the confusion continues. The other way of handling this is a series of knee jerk reactions. We respond to each crisis with a shift in strategy and focus. We initiate new programs, processes, new […]