Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
What’s This BS About Helping Our Customers?!?!
We read all the time that we are supposed to be helpful to our customers. We have to help them understand the need to change, perhaps inciting them to change. We have to help them through their buying process. We have to help them understand new opportunities, the challenges/risks of change, how to reach consensus……. According to all the experts, we have to do all of this stuff to help our customers succeed. But, what about us–the sellers? We have our goals and quotas to make. It’s coming onto the Holiday Season, we need those commission checks! Shouldn’t we be […]
You Can’t Opt Out Of Accountability!
In every job and role, we are held accountable. It may be for certain goals. It may be in the ways we conduct ourselves, working with our peers, customers, and others. It may be how we do our work and with who we do it. Accountability applies to everyone–our customers have things, for which they are accountable. Each person in our own organization has things for which they are accountable. Accountability isn’t optional. We don’t choose those things for which we are accountable, it comes with the job we’ve chosen to do. We sign up for these accountabilities when we […]
Coaching In The Middle….
Every few years, we revisit the concept of, “Who do we coach?” I’m starting to see a series of articles re-arguing that managers get the greatest return on their coaching time by “coaching in the middle.” The argument being, when we look at sales performance, we tend to see a normal distribution, or the classic bell curve. We have a small number of very high performers, hopefully, a very small number of low performers, and the bulk of our people are somewhere in the middle. When you start running math models, you start looking at things like: “If we have […]
Are We Creating The Value Our Customers Value?
Selling is about creating value…. Well, yeah, … but we have differing views of value, which often focuses on us and not the value customers need…. To most sellers, it’s fitting the customer’s budget and winning because we might have a few more features than the alternatives, or are cheaper. The customer is very knowledgeable, they know what they need and want, our goal is to get them to choose us. To some, it’s creating a business case that meets the customer goals. We may demonstrate the ROI or some other business case, focusing on justifying the purchase of our […]
When The Going Gets Tough
For the past several years, news gets tougher and tougher. First the pandemic, we and our customers had to discover new ways of working, engaging and moving forward. “Virtual” became the watchword for how things got done–whether it involved internal collaboration, partners, or customer engagement. Just as we started to learn how to manage in the pandemic, we start seeing supply chain challenges. Lead times became very long, the ability to satisfy our customers’ needs were challenged. We found we could get the order, but delivering it became more challenging–or when customers found we couldn’t deliver, they’d choose to do […]
On Performance Planning…..
Performance planning is one of the most powerful tools for managers and their people. Yet, too often, I don’t see organizations fully exploit the power of performance plans and the performance planning/management process. Too often, we view this process as “something HR makes us do.” As a result, we take whatever template HR provides, fill in a few blanks, like quota, comp, etc, then send it to the person. Each person has basically the same performance plan, each person files it away, ignoring it until the performance review. Sometimes, we also view performance plans in a “punitive” manner. “If you […]