Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Your Dashboards Are Useless, What Are Your 5 KPI’s?
As typical, I was sitting with a leadership team reviewing their performance. The RevOps exec, displayed the organization’s performance dashboard. We’ve all seen them, all sorts of graphics with dials, red lights, row after row of numbers. I counted, this dashboard was tracking over 30 items. There was lots of discussion about various numbers, usually the resolution was, “We have to do more….” Finally, the CRO asked for my view. I think I disappointed everyone, they thought I was going to present some keen insights about how to improve performance. Instead, I posed a single question? “What are the 5 […]
“It’s Not A Numbers Game, It’s A Human Game!”
Anyone entering into selling immediately sees the obsession we have with numbers. We are focused on hitting our revenue goals, not just by the end of the year, but quarterly and monthly. Recognizing revenue is a trailing metric, we become obsessed with things that tell us whether we will achieve those goals. We become obsessed with forecasts, pipelines, and their health. And that drives us to look at our prospecting and activity metrics. How many emails, how many calls, how many meetings, how many demos how many proposals, how many bathroom breaks………. And the gurus reinforce and intensify this. They […]
“If You Can’t Do It Yourself……”
“If you can’t do it yourself, you probably shouldn’t be using AI!” This was a brilliant observation by James Pursey in an outstanding seminar on AI in sales. The only modification I would make would be to say, “If you can’t do it excellently yourself, you probably shouldn’t be using AI!” James gets at the root of so many of the issues we see about the terrible use of LLMs in selling, marketing, customer service. We all have been the subject of the most horrible LLM generated emails, social media conversations, AI generated posts. Many have fallen victim to misstatements/hallucinations […]
Doing Our People’s Jobs……
One of the biggest mistakes I see too many managers make, is they dive in and start doing their people’s jobs. The motivations for this range from being well intended to malicious. We have all seen the managers believing they are the best sales people in the world, sweeping their people aside, playing “Superseller” in important customer calls. We see managers impatient with their people saying, “I can get this done faster….” We see well intended managers saying, “This is new, something we’ve never done before, I can probably get it done better than the people responsible for getting it […]
Coaching Our Customers
I recently wrote an updated version of “What Is Coaching?” In it, I focused on how leaders coach and develop their people. At the end of the article, I had and Afterword, suggesting the same principles used in high impact coaching within our own organizations should be applied in working with our customers. I want to do a deeper dive in this article. Rather than repeat all the things about what coaching is and isn’t, how we effectively coach, I’ll summarize three key areas here, but for the details go back to the What is Coaching article: When we look […]
What Is Coaching?
It seems the word “Coaching” has become one of those fashionable words, permeating every discussion. Go back 15 or more years, and we barely saw the word coaching. Today, we find coaching applying to about everything we do, both in business and in our personal lives. We see Executive Coaching, Career Coaching, Life Coaching, Performance Coaching, Business Coaching, Health/Wellness Coaching, Agile/Team Coaching, Sales Coaching, Spiritual Coaching, Dietary Coaching, and on an on and on. Endless “influencers” in social media claim to be providing coaching, where all they are really doing is broadcasting. There is the concept of coaching for virtually […]