Dave Brock
Dave Brock is the founder of Partners in EXCELLENCE, a consulting and services company helping to improve the effectiveness of business professionals with strategy development, organizational planning, and implementation. Dave has spent his career working for and with high performance organizations, ranging from the Fortune 25 to startups, including companies such as IBM, HP, Nokia, AT&T, Microsoft, General Electric, and many, many more. The work Dave does with business strategies is closely tied to personal effectiveness of the people in the organization. As a result, Dave is deeply involved in the development of a number of training and coaching programs.
Latest
The Courage to Commit and Execute
Developing new strategies and new programs is exciting. The problem is committing to the execution of the programs. It’s no longer about powerful ideas, but it’s the tough work of making it happen.
“Let’s See How Much We Can Confuse Our Customers!”
If we want to optimize our results, we can’t confuse our customers or channel partners. We have to design buying experiences from their points of view. The challenges it creates for our own organizations to achieve their goals is our problem to solve, not the customer’s or the channel partners.
What’s Your Situational Awareness?
Talk to anyone in the military about tactics, and a topic that comes up very quickly is situational awareness. There are a lot of technical definitions, but in it’s simplest form, situational awareness is about “paying attention to what’s happening around you.”
Does Your Customer Understand Your Differentiation?
I’m often amazed by the discussions—or absence of discussions—on differentiation. In order to win, we have to differentiate our solutions, but we have to differentiate them in the areas the customer cares about.
Do You Trust Your People Enough to Let Them Think?
It’s odd, we interview people, anxious to hire the best and the brightest. Those people that have the proven track records, skills and experience to perform at the highest levels.
Funnel/Pipeline Games
The funnel/pipeline is a fundamental tool for sales professionals and managers. It’s the tool that helps us understand whether we are on target to meeting our goals. I spend a lot of time looking at funnels. I’ve seen all sorts of issues and potential games (inadvertent and purposeful) that are played with pipelines. I thought I’d spend a little time on a few of them.
Just Good Enough: The Minimum Viable Sales/Marketing Strategy
For years, I’ve been a proponent of “Just Good Enough” as a sales or marketing strategy. Perhaps in today’s context, Just Good Enough might be called The Minimum Viable Sales/Marketing Strategy.
“Is There Anyone Else We Should Be Talking To?”
Sometimes we become so task focused, we lose site of the bigger picture and what we could be doing. And we forget something critical, we forget to ask, “Is there anyone else we should be talking to?”
Rethinking Prospecting
What if instead of searching for people who want to buy our products and services, we decided to search for people with problems? Not just any problem, but the problems we solve?
Questions as Weapons
Too often, as business professionals, we use questions as weapons. We ask questions with an agenda. We’re not looking for answers. We’re not looking to learn.