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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
Do We Even Need A Sales Process?
If no one is using our sales processes, do we even need them? Are we just wasting a lot of time? I’ve argued for years that every buyer’s situation is different, every decision process is different. Given that, maybe a sales process is just a distraction. Maybe it’s slowing us down. Maybe it just doesn’t matter. When I work with clients, they always talk about their sales process. Salespeople update CRM, mostly because their managers want to inspect the pipeline and make the forecast. But when I start asking about specific deals; why is this one in this stage, what’s […]
The SaaS Sales Factory Is Broken
Look at most SaaS organizations today and you’ll hear the same language. Activities, velocity, scaling, predictable revenue. The underlying design has always been to build a selling factory; standardized inputs, consistent throughput, scalable output, predictable revenue. Sales strategists and leaders cite Lean Manufacturing and the Toyota Production System as the inspiration. They talk about the principles, having only read the books, but not understanding what drove the success of Lean and TPS in manufacturing. They believed the selling/buying process was simply another assembly line. Taiichi Ohno, Eiji Toyoda, and W. Edwards built something that turned traditional manufacturing processes upside down. […]
We’ve Built The Scoreboard, But Forgotten The Game.
Somewhere along the way, we replaced the mission, our outcomes, with the metric. What gets our attention are the scoreboards and dashboards, instead of what we are trying to achieve. It’s happened gradually, disguised as data-driven management. We built dashboards. We set targets. We tracked performance. And in that process, we got lost. The metric was never supposed to be the point. It was supposed to tell us whether we were on the path to achieving our goals, executing the mission. Instead, it became the focal point. We forgot about the outcomes and the mission entirely. Watch what managers focus […]
Are We Using the Same Map?
Every seller has a map. It’s called a sales process. It has stages, milestones, and exit criteria. It tells sellers where they are, what they should be doing, and where they’re headed. In theory, it’s a GPS for getting from first conversation to a closed deal. While they have this “map/GPS,” based on their best experience, too often, they ignore it. They know a better way, they know the short-cuts, or “this situation is different. Instead of using the map, they “know better,” navigating by instinct. Sometimes instinct works. More often, it produces a longer, less efficient path. Or the […]
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, […]