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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 Happens When We Stop Talking To Each Other?
This morning, going through my social feeds, I happened on this pronouncement: “If any of my friends are supporting, [Insert the other party’s candidates], please unfriend me. You are entitled to your opinions, but I have no desire to engage with you…..” While this was the most pronounced articulation, I see too much of the same thing happening. Family members can no longer talk to other family members, neighbors will not engage with neighbors, …….. This is particularly heightened in the current US political environment, and I suspect in other countries. But we see versions of this in so many […]
Isn’t Buyer Enablement Everyone’s Job?
I read a fascinating discussion on LinkedIn. As with many discussions, there were many aspects I thought were enlightening, some I agreed with, many I disagreed with. But the post started with statements around “Buyers only engage with sellers after 80% of the buying process is done.” “Buyers don’t want to talk to sellers.” The ensuing discussion suggested we needed to focus on “Buyer Enablement.” People chimed in with lots of ideas and solutions, “Isn’t marketing’s job buyer enablement,” was the opinion of many. Many, including the author suggested the establishment of a “Buyer Enablement” function. It would become the […]
Thinking Outside The “Box”
Recently, I attended a conference. I sat with a group focused on GTM strategies and how they were structuring their strategies to drive growth. A few of the panelists started showing organization charts, discussing how they were restructuring their organizations to improve results. Each chart showed hierarchies of boxes, each with a functional name. Some showed how they were restructuring sales and marketing, moving to a Revenue structure. The presented the “before” and “after” org charts, the only thing that seemed to have changed is the CRO role and a RevOPs hierarchy combining marketing and sales ops. In the presentation […]
Can You Do What AI Can’t?
We have become enamored with all the things AI can do to help sellers. It provides the potential of eliminating all sorts of tasks that, somehow, seems to fill our time. Updating CRM, drafts of prospecting letters, drafts of proposals, research on industry, market, customer issues. The list of things that filled our time goes on. And as both our understanding of AI and AI, itself, develops, there are things that AI can’t do. But they are critical to our jobs. Can you do those things? Are you doing those things with the time that AI is freeing from other […]
Coaching Must Focus On “What’s Next….”
We have endless tools to help us analyze sales performance. Whether it’s performance dashboards, looking at performance to date, or conversational intelligence tools that help us understand what happened. We know the gap, and our coaching focuses on, “You have to make the number, go do more!” There are a number of variations of this, but most of it is retrospective. All performance data is retrospective. It tells us what has happened. But it doesn’t necessarily inform us about why it’s happened. And it does nothing to tell us what we must do in going forward. But too often, our […]
“You Have 30 Days……!”
I’ve been reading a number of articles about people being terminated, or put on PIPs, 30 days to fix the problem. It culminated, today, in a discussion I had with one of the most talented CROs I’ve met. She was being recruited by another company. She said, “Dave, their key issue in recruiting someone is how to fix their Q3 EBITDA problem!” This coming from a $B plus organization. I responded, “Hold on a moment, let me look at my watch…… Oh, we are a month + into Q3, even if you started today, it’s impossible for you to fix […]