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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 If We Started Thinking About Durable Revenue and Revenue Quality?
We’ve been trained to worship the recurring revenue model. It’s the star metric in every SaaS pitch deck, with ARR growth as the bedrock of business models. It dominates our feeds, the press and much of our thinking in business. Unicorns have been built on this recurring revenue model. But lately, that model has been shaky. And, I have to confess, I’ve always been a little confused. What about the revenue and growth models of all the other businesses outside SaaS? How could they have possibly been successful without the recurring revenue models? What is different about them? Afterall, SaaS […]
There Is NEVER “Just One Way!”
I see so much talk about GTM, selling, marketing, customer service strategies. Too many claiming, “We have found the way….” Others saying “Here is the playbook for your GTM strategy…..” In some sectors, like SaaS, we’ve seen many organizations struggle and fail by implementing the “SaaS GTM model.” The SaaS PLG motion differs from the SaaS individual/team focus which differs from SaaS technologies that can only be implemented on an enterprise wide basis, and this differs from a channel/partner based motion. Likewise, we see the same for processes, methodologies, playbooks, outreach, marketing, and all other things that help us engage […]
On Insularity
We live in overlapping circles on “Insularity.” Our families, friends, communities. Our teammates, functions, organizations, industries. These insular communities provide us different levels of security and comfort. From a professional point of view, they are made up of people doing similar things, facing similar issues/challenges. While we may compete with each other in the markets, we learn from each other, see differing approaches, sometimes seeing new opportunities. And when we face challenges, generally many in our communities are seeing the same thing, so we feel less “alone.” There is a certain amount of comfort in saying, “Everyone else is experiencing […]
Rethinking AI For Innovation, Not Automation
I’ve been on a tear this week, talking about AI. I’m so excited about it’s potential, yet I get so frustrated about too many of the current use cases. We are obsessed with how many tasks can be automated by AI, freeing up our time. Without a doubt, AI can have a huge impact on how we spend our time, offloading meaningless tasks. (As a sidenote, so much of the early results of these efforts, don’t seem to show improvements in results, at least in our GTM strategies.). But I worry this obsession with automating tasks/processes might cause us to […]
It’s Not Your Job!!!
Last week, I had another “argument” with one of the highest performing CROs I’ve been privileged to work with. We’ve worked with each other, in various roles, for about 10 years. Our “arguments” are conversations where we push each other very hard. We are comfortable with them, because we know we are in lockstep on our goals, purpose, and friendship. Sometimes, people who happen to observe them are shocked, “Dave you are pushing her awfully hard!!! or people tell her, “You are being really bad to Dave, you should listen to him, plus you should be kinder to the elderly….” […]
Outsourcing Our Thinking
Foreword/Forewarning: This is a bit longish, my apologies. But hang in there. At the end, I’ve included a special treat. I asked ChatGPT to weigh in on these ideas. She lets loose! It’s hilarious, but painfully on target. Enjoy!! About 14 years ago, I wrote a post, Outsourcing Our Thinking. There, I discussed my concern with seller and manager ability to think critically. I talked about succumbing to “Just do this one thing,” or “Here is the formula/script,” and other techniques being promoted by guru’s of various types. Fast forward, 14 years, it’s gotten so much worse. My feeds are […]