Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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.
Pardon me for making a slight digression in my posts on leadership, GTM, selling, AI, and other things. On Friday, I lost Lita. Lita was about 11 years old, a rescue cat. She was special in so many ways. She touched everyone she met. While it seems odd, I think she made me a better person (as all our pets do). I found her–rather she found me about 3.5 years ago. I wanted another cat to keep Harley company. At the shelter, I was actually looking at a couple of other cats. They put me in a room with about […]
Read MoreThis week, two separate conversations with CROs. Completely different markets/industries, both high performing in their segments. But they were deeply frustrated. “We’re struggling to make our numbers!” As we dove into it, their markets were OK, customers were still growing and investing. Then we dove into the data, pipelines very anemic, but win rates, average deal sizes, sales cycles were reasonable. “What are they doing to find and qualify new opportunities? Where are they struggling with their prospecting?” I asked. As we reviewed it, their teams were doing pretty good jobs, there were some areas of improvement, but it seemed […]
Read MoreMy feeds in social media are filled with Cheatsheets, Hacks, Templates—all sorts of tools. They attract lots of interest, lots of requests. People are looking for anything they can do to help them do their jobs, to find the shortcuts or secrets to success. I look at them, most are pretty good, there are always interesting ideas and approaches. But there’s a problem with them……… They don’t really work. Let me revise that, they work extraordinarily well for the people that develop them. But they aren’t as effective, ultimately don’t work for everyone else. People read them, perhaps try them, […]
Read MoreI speak with lots of leaders about their GTM strategies. My social channels are dominated by experts suggesting the GTM strategies. One of the things I’ve started doing is counting how many times they use the word, “Customer.” It’s surprising how seldom the word is used. When it is, it’s used in the context of the customer being the target of a set of strategies and activities. But most of the time, it seems the word, Customer, is a distraction from what we are trying to do. We define outreach programs, looking at content, channel, volume, velocity. We set goals […]
Read MoreJust as a humorous preface, I wanted to write about our mistaken impressions of Hunting and Farming. I wanted to suggest both co-exist, both in new and current accounts. So I was looking at how I might combine the concepts into one word. At first I came up with Harming—which I discarded for very obvious reasons. That left me with with the concept of Funting. I’m not totally satisfied with this, and am open to suggestions. The concepts of hunting and farming have classically been applied to the acquisition of new customer logos and how we manage those customers/logos once […]
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