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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
Gaming The Numbers
Some years ago, the leader of an outbound SDR team had set very aggressive call goals. This leader held the people accountable for making their goals, but they struggled. But one person consistently beat the goals. The leader held this individual up as a high performer. But when I started looking at the performance, I realized, despite consistently meeting the goals, the number of qualified leads this person was developing was about the same as his peers. I thought, “Why is this person significantly and consistently exceeding the call goals, but the results are mediocre?” I started listening to the […]
ChatGPT Takes The Stage, Imagining “HamletGPT”
There was a fascinating, probably overlooked, Superbowl commercial. It was GoDaddy’s, Act Like You Know commercial. It showed an actor thrust into a scene which he executes with great precision. One of the scenes was an actor driving, with authority, in a race. He was moving, with authority through the group of cars. Closeups showed him focusing on the race, steering a precise line, shifting, managing the precise heel and toe on the brake/clutch. The actor was masterful in these 5 seconds. Then it move to the outtakes, the actor was driving haphazardly on the course, not knowing how to […]
The Problem With Playbooks
We all have playbooks. Today, the Chiefs and Eagles will be using theirs, each in hope of winning the Super Bowl. In selling and GTM, we have our playbooks. Marketing has any number of them, SDRs, BDRs, AEs, AMs, Rev-ops/enablement, Customer service, all of us have our playbooks. All our leaders have their playbooks. Running a consulting organization, we have our own playbooks in finding/closing business, how we work with clients, in projects, and other areas. Each of us have our own personal playbooks on getting through the day—rise/shine, feed the cats, workout, two cups of coffee, journaling…… (at least […]
Win Rates, Are You Important To Your Customer?
Recently, I’ve been involved in a number of discussions about “Win Rates.” There’s a huge amount of misunderstanding on all aspects of Win Rates. Lots of misunderstanding about how you measure these. There have also been lots of discussions about “high win rates.” The majority of my clients, after we have identified and work the issues have very high win rates. Many in the 70 to high 80% range. Most, well over 50%. People are astounded, they think these clients might be doing something with the numbers, gaming them in some way to inflate their win rates. For many, these […]
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
This is probably the closest to a “political post” I will ever write. Much of the drive to write this comes from watching/reading the news. I am disgusted by behaviors I see in both parties, by much of the media, and by too many “influencers.” But a lot of this view comes from reading my feeds in LI, observing discussions, participating in some. Some comes from the strictly business focused discussions I see. I understand differing positions, beliefs, POVs. I understand differing objectives, priorities, agendas. I understand, unfortunately, that some of these differences may be irreconcilable. What I can’t understand, […]
Hilarious, Possibly Frightening AI Hallucinations
Long time readers will know that I’ve been leveraging Google NotebookLM for AI generated conversations of my posts. For the most part, they are very good. There are always interesting ideas, observations, and sometimes fascinating twists on the writing. There are some hallucinations, but many that are knowable only to me. Listeners may not even recognize these as hallucinations. But recently, many of my posts have become more analytic and problem solving in nature. Some very directive on “here are the equations and analysis we use.” And in those conversations, I notice the models really struggle. They tend to invent […]