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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 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 […]
Attitude Is Everything!
“Attitude” is one of the most confidently used, yet least defined words in our vocabularies. We hire for attitude, we fire for it. “Jill’s got the right attitude!” “What’s it with Ned and his bad attitude?” Attitude permeates our language, training, and performance discussions, but when we use it, what are we talking about? When we use the word attitude, what do we mean? What’s the definition of the word? And if we understand that, can we actually do anything about attitudes? When someone has the “right attitude,” what does that mean? What we are really observing is their behaviors. […]
Drowning in Acronyms: A Survival Guide
This morning I was reading a series of LinkedIn posts. A colleague had a fascinating and important post, and he introduced an acronym that would help us remember it. Then I saw others about MEDDICC, MEDDPICC, SPICED and even one on BANT. Then I started scrolling through MQLs, SQLs, and ICPs. And then there are FOMO, FOMU, FOFU. And we have ABM, ABS, ABE….. SaaS introduced a whole new variety of acronyms. Rather than using terms that fit other markets, it introduced a new language and the associated acronyms: ARR, LTV, CAC, NRR and on and on. Where other industries […]
When Performance Problems Aren’t Obvious—Yet!
Preface: This is much longer than my usual posts, but this is such an important issue–and success tends to hide it. I was talking with a CEO recently. Her company was hitting plan. Customer retention was solid. The team seemed engaged. By every measure that matters, things were working. “So what’s the problem?” I asked. She paused. “I don’t know exactly. I just have this feeling we’re leaving a lot on the table. But I can’t prove it. And when I raise it, people look at me like I’m crazy. We’re making our numbers.” This is the hardest kind of […]
Why Benchmarking Fails
Benchmarking other organizations, identifying best practices has been a cornerstone of business strategy for decades. It gives us the opportunity to study how others get things done, to learn, and to adapt what we’ve learned into our own organizations. We benchmark our competitors, their strategies, and products. Or we look at the very high performing companies, the ones scaling outrageously. We study their GTM strategies, their org structures, their programs, and metrics. We put the same things in place for our own organizations. When we’re considering a new tool, technology, or training program, we typically benchmark it. Vendors point us […]
Protect Your Focus!
Tobia La Marca said something fascinating a few weeks ago (he says a lot of fascinating things). A sentence stood out: “Protect Your Focus.” It’s particularly ironic that at this moment, I’m jumping between writing this article, looking at an email that just arrived, thinking about a meeting in an hour, and seeing alerts creeping up on LinkedIn. We all suffer from this inability to focus. Our devices and apps create massive distractions. And our own minds cause us to drift from topic to topic. In these distractions, we feel as though we are accomplishing things. We clear our emails […]