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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
The Coming Recession….
I’m starting to get “those” calls. Execs are asking for advice. They are expecting difficult times, they are trying to figure out how to deal with the uncertainty in the economy that all of us face. We’re already seeing the early signs of it. Layoffs, before unimaginable, are happening and more are preparing for reductions. Where a few months ago we were scrambling for talent, comp was skyrocketing to attract the right people; now we are seeing job offers being withdrawn. Execs are also asking, “How do we maintain sales, how do we keep driving revenue as much as possible? […]
“In Working With Other Customers Like You…..”
Our customers are hungry to learn. They (and we) benchmark themselves against their competition and others. They compare what they do with what others do, finding opportunities to change and improve. I’m fond of saying, “we are prisoners of our own experience….” We tend to act based on what we’ve done in the past, often blind to the fact that things have changed, or there may be better/different approaches that may be more effective. One of the greatest things sellers can do is help customers learn what other are doing. We’ve learned the power of “In working with other customers […]
A Different Perspective On Revenue Enablement….
Revenue Enablement is a hot topic these days. I have to confess, it confuses me. I mean, hasn’t revenue enablement–that is maximizing our ability to create and grow revenue, been key for our organizations forever (We might, also, consider Profit Enablement)? Isn’t the responsibility of every customer facing function to figure ways to grow revenue and profits. Whether it’s acquiring new customers, retaining and growing them, doing the things that enable us to profitably grow revenue has always been part of our job. So I’m confused about why Revenue Enablement is such a new thing. So I studied it a […]
Predictable Revenue And Wild Assed Guessing
Predictable Revenue, a concept popularized by Aaron Ross in the first edition of Predictable Revenue (2011), is important. It’s important to us, perhaps to forecast commission earnings and when we might buy that new car or go on the big vacation. It’s important to our managers to know whether we are going to make our revenue commitments in the organization. It’s important to other functions in the company, so they know what products to build and ship, or how to have the right services resources deployed. It’s important to our shareholders because it impacts our share price and company valuation. […]
Thinking About PLG
I’ll confess, upfront, that I’m skeptical, perhaps even a little cynical about Product Led Growth (PLG). It’s very hot and fashionable right now, but in reality applies to only a very small number of organizations and solutions. PLG based strategies only apply to products in which an individual can acquire and get some value from a product. The idea being, once you identify a critical mass of users within an organization, how they are leveraging the product, you can rapidly expand sales within that organization by identifying other, similar end users, ultimately expanding into the entire organization. Because of the […]
Misunderstanding Comp
I’ve seen some “interesting” discussions around comp plans in the last few days. Basically, a number of them have been around what is preferable, low base as a percent of OTE, up to high base as a percent of OTE. Some of the discussion was around keeping the based as low as possible, with the idea of “saving money” if people don’t meet their OTE goals. I get it–I guess–but it seems like that mentality is a defeatist mentality. It seems these managers are betting against their peoples’ success. As managers, we WANT our people to achieve their OTE! We […]