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
Productivity, Effectiveness, Efficiency
I don’t know why I’m surprised, but I was—-actually shocked. Yesterday, I opened an email from a very reputable SaaS company. I was interested because the piece was focused on understanding the difference in productivity and efficiency. And virtually everything covered was wrong–dangerously wrong. The same confusion, about these terms fills our social feeds. We don’t understand these terms, and how to leverage them appropriately, we will fail—possibly very efficiently. So let’s start with some definitions: Efficiency: Efficiency is strictly a measure of some sort of quantity accomplished in a period of time or for a certain “investment.” For example, […]
“Think Time….”
Our focus on activity causes us to overlook the importance of idle time—time to think, reflect, plan. We seek to fill every moment of our time with activity. Whether it’s prospecting, managing deals, reporting, time for meetings, etc. We go from activity to activity, rarely pausing to reflect on what has happened. We go to the next activity, not taking the time to think about what we want to accomplish. Much of the WFH argument is based on activity. We don’t have to spend time commuting, so we fill that with more activities. We don’t have the social distractions and […]
How I’m Using ChatGPT
I’ve been writing a lot of posts about my experiences with ChatGPT. It takes time to learn, it takes time to figure out how to refine a series of queries, prompts to explore issues. While many are reveling in ChatGPT’s ability to paper the world with endless amounts of drivel, I mean content, I find it not that useful. Even with a lot of prompting, it’s content is mediocre. It lacks data, it lacks specifics. The time it takes to refine a story around issues–well, I could write it from scratch more quickly (And I can submit it to GPT […]
Activity As A Proxy For Productivity
The good news/bad news, is that we have so many selling and marketing tools providing us endless amounts of data–particularly around activity. We can count the number of emails, opens, click throughs. We count the number of dials, voicemails, conversations. As our work, increasingly, is done through our devices, we can measure how much time our people are spending on virtually every aspect of their job. How much and what research they are doing. How active they are through the day. We measure everything about every deal in their pipelines. We count the number of meetings, calls, demos, proposals made. […]
Losing Focus, Prone To Distraction….
I’m sitting at my desk, staring at my computer screen—actually screens. Like you, I have dozens of windows open. Some have been open for days and I forgot about them. I have two 30 inch screens. I need them to fit all the different windows I keep open. I need them to keep me aware and “productive.” Right now, I’m working on writing this post, but out of the corner of my eye, I see google messaging me that 5 emails landed in my inbox–that’s new in the last 5 minutes. I also see LinkedIn signaling me with a number […]
What If We Sold The Way Our Customers Want To Buy?
Calm down, give me a few moments to defend my case. I know it’s an absurd concept–selling the way our customers want to buy. Afterall, we have our quotas. We have our cadences, sequences, we have to reach out to hundreds or thousands of people a day, we have to constantly be pitching. We have to fill our pipelines, we have to move prospects through our process, we have to move them to a fast decision. We have our process, we have to execute it, we have to produce results! Don’t slow us down, we have work to do. Yet, […]