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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
Helping Your Customer Imagine New Possibilities
We are each consumed with problems. Problems we encounter in our jobs, problems our organizations have, problems in our industries and markets, problems in…… It’s overwhelming and exhausting. We can’t possibly address all of them, and too often, when we do, new challenges pop up. Too often, we push the problems to the side, just ignoring them, accepting the consequences. Too often, when we look at change and addressing a problem, we worry if we are doing the right thing, we are consumed with FOMU (Fear of Messing Up). And, the majority of change initiatives are abandoned because of this. […]
Win Rates And Prospecting
Despite YoY plummeting win rates, based on my feeds, the biggest challenge facing sellers is not winning, but seems to be prospecting, engaging customers in conversations, hopefully finding and qualifying new opportunities. The data seems to support this, customers saying they don’t want to talk to sellers, outreaches to get a single response are 7-10 times what was required just a few years ago. When we actually get a customer on a call, our conversion rates are horrible, and getting worse. The solution too many seem to have is, “Do more!” AI and other tools enable us to ramp up […]
Improving Win Rates!
Win rates are critical to driving performance and achieving our goals. Win rates are critical to our understanding of our pipelines. We leverage them to help us understand whether we are working a sufficient volume high quality opportunities to achieve our goals. The higher our win rates, the more we shift the pipeline numbers in our favor. As a simple example, today, we settle for 15-20% win rates. Everything else being equal, and it seldom is, we need 5-6 times pipeline coverage to achieve our goals. Improving win rates to 30-40%, which usually is not that difficult, nor does it […]
What If Failure Was An Option?
We never, purposefully, set out to fail. But our fear of failure prevents us from learning, improving, and growing. This fear of failure, whether self or organizationally imposed, actually condemns us to more failures over time. We create all sorts of mantras, suggesting we don’t fear failure. “Fail fast, fail often!” “Fail forward.” “Move fast and break things.” Yet when we fail, we tend to punish those we perceive to have failed. We fire a person who hasn’t made their quota, we fail to look at why and what might be done to reverse it. We create structures and rules […]
“Where Do Your People Want To Be Taken?”
Ask yourself a question, “Are you taking your people where they want/need to be taken?” Too often, we tend to focus on where we need to go/what we want to accomplish, but we fail in engaging our people as effectively, taking them where they need to be taken. Recently, I’ve had a fascinating experience working with a very high potential CRO. He had never been in a leadership role, but now found himself in leading the selling team for a high growth start up. Our initial meetings were consumed with fire fighting. He had inherited some challenges, some bad commitments, […]
Moving To “Problem Solving”
We seem to be wired to react and respond. When we encounter a problem, we immediately jump on it doing what we can do to correct it, getting back on course. It seems like a game of business/selling “whack a mole.” A problem pops up here, we put a fix in place, another one appears somewhere else, we fix that, another pops up….. We move from problem to problem, “whacking” them, only to have more pop up elsewhere. And, too often, the things we thought we solved pop up again. We end up going in circles, forever, solving and re-solving […]