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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 Nerve Of Those Prospects, Look At What They Are Doing To Us!”
My feeds are filled with articles, tips and advice about lots of things customers and prospects inflict on we poor sales people. It may be “ghosting,” or “the stall,” “or not giving us the information we need,” or “ignoring our outreach,” or even, “lying.” The total absence of consideration of these prospects to our work and outreach, their lack of respect for our hard work is reprehensible! The lists of things sales people use to assign blame to customer behaviors seems endless. If only these customers/prospects would stop doing these bad things, then we could move forward and make our […]
“Appealing To Everyone Means You Appeal To No One!”
This morning I had a fascinating conversation with a CMO for a very large technology company. We were talking about a huge challenge they faced in driving growth. They have a very large customer base, built of decades with truly innovative products. Within those traditional markets, they had a dominant share. But those markets wouldn’t support their growth ambitions. They had to start reaching out engaging and acquiring new customers in very different markets. The CMO was struggling with the strategy for doing this. He was getting a lot of pressure from sales, from the CEO and others to broaden […]
Coaching Confusion
This is a good news/bad news post. For years, there has been little attention paid to the topic of coaching. Sure, there was lip service, but when one looked deeply into organizations, either coaching wasn’t done, or the coaching that was done was horrible. In the past year, there has been increasing attention to coaching–at least when measured by social media articles, and, possibly, VC investments. Despite the increasing attention, there is even more confusion, and, I’m not sure how much of this attention is actually translating into high impact performance based coaching. I number of ancillary indicators would indicate […]
The Prospecting Presentation….
I was recently asked to review the “first meeting” presentation for a large technology organization. As a disclaimer, this organization’s presentation was no different than 100’s of these that I’ve seen from other organizations, or pitches that have been inflicted on me in first meetings with potential vendors. But, it’s interesting to look at this as an example of how we “connect” with customers. Some observations: This presentation was intended for initial meetings with prospective customers. As an aside, I have a basic aversion to any PowerPoint presentation in a first meeting. It seems to me the meeting should be […]
On Time Management, A Non-Traditional View
Time management is, more than ever, an issue for each of us. While so many of us have been working from home, our travel and F2F meetings have been restricted, somehow it seems our challenges with managing time has become a much bigger challenge. We can understand this, in the last two years, it’s been difficult to separate our work and personal lives. They are, literally, intertwined. We spend our days in a few rooms, with our families restricted to the same rooms, moving from task to task. Just the mindless task of grabbing a cup of coffee and having […]
On Measures, Metrics, KPIs
In selling (marketing, sales, customer experience) and business, in general, data, measures, metrics, and KPIs are important, and, sometimes, helpful. It’s become fashionable to quote, Goodhart’s Law, which states, “When a measure becomes a target, it seems to become a good measure.” Well……, Yes……, but what does that mean? When you think about it, Goodhart’s statement is less about measures and more about human behavior. Let’s start at the beginning. A measure is simply that. It’s a number or indicator of some sort. For example, a measure may be “I made 50 calls…” or “I sent 100 emails …..” or […]