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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
You Can Lead A Seller To Water, But You Can’t Make Them Think!
We’ve built something remarkable in modern sales organizations. Over the past two decades, we’ve constructed an elaborate infrastructure: scripts, playbooks, sequences, talk tracks, battle cards, cadences. We’ve constructed metrics tracking every activity, with performance dashboards providing red/yellow/green signals. We’ve built tech stacks that are the envy of our competitors. These have all been designed, theoretically, to drive consistent, scalable growth. But there’s a problem. In our pursuit of consistency and activity, we have systematically designed thinking out of the profession. And now AI is making that visible. We started with good intentions. Sales leaders looked at their top performers, tried […]
Discovery Isn’t Just For Selling
We’ve spent decades drilling the importance of discovery into every sales methodology. We teach our people that you never lead with a pitch. You never assume you know the customer’s problem. You ask, you listen, you explore. You earn the right to propose a solution by first deeply understanding the situation. And we know that discovery isn’t one-directional. The best discovery conversations are those where the customer is learning too — clarifying their own thinking about the problem, seeing connections they hadn’t seen, developing a sharper understanding of what they actually need. When both sides are collaborating in this process, […]
Do I Care?
Mitch Little read my recent post on competing to lose 80-85% of our deals and responded with something that stopped me: “Your analysis is spot on. You clearly outline how to succeed. Now how do we light that fire?” He went further: “If people do not truly care, but only go through the motions, we will continue to actually deteriorate in outcomes.” My first instinct was to write about how organizations need to create conditions where people care. How leaders need to restructure metrics, coach differently, and focus on quality over volume. But the more I thought about it, I […]
“We Are Competing To Lose 80-85% Of Our Deals!”
Imagine a CRO presenting to the exec or investor team. This CRO is presenting their GTM strategy, and a key statement in that strategy is, “We are competing and hoping to lose 80-85% of the deals we invest in!” We all know what happens. That CRO is sent packing, a new CRO is brought in, a new playbook. Three months later, we see, “We are competing to lose 80-85% of our deals!” This strategy is unspoken. Few would call it a strategy, but it’s pervasive in so many organizations, particularly in the tech sector. The way it’s expressed is, “We […]
Is AI Making Our People More Capable Or More Efficient?
News about AI tools fills all my feeds and most of my conversations. New tools/use cases emerge almost hourly. Surveys show 94% of companies are “using” AI in some way. In GTM, AI is hitting everything we do. Our outbound messaging and emails, our pre-call research, conversational intelligence, performance dashboards, and too many to mention. And AI Agents are taking over much of the work, itself, handling responses, calls, scheduling meetings and many more. We hear so much about how efficient AI is making us. It compresses tasks that used to take hours into minutes. But there is a key […]
What If The Sales Process Helped Customers?
The sales process is critical to navigating our way to winning each deal. We have carefully crafted stages, each identifies critical activities and exit criteria. All targeted to the close and a PO. Each is carefully structured, focusing on our activities and our progress. Did we qualify them? Did we conduct the discovery call? Did we do the demo? Did we provide them a proposal? Are we handling their objections? Are we conducting the right negotiations to win? We have metrics measuring our progress. How much time in each stage? What is the deal velocity? We associate our probability of […]