Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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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
Creating Customers For Life…..
No, this isn’t a post on the importance of retention/renewal/expansion, though the underlying principles can impact retention/renewal/expansion. It’s a very different focus on our customers, what they mean to us and what we mean to them. This came up in a discussion, someone was asking about Partners In EXCELLENCE, our GTM process, and our strategies. I mentioned, offhandedly, that we have a principle underlying everything we do. I said, “We are driven by creating customers for life!” What does this mean? First, when we create customers for life, we have a couple of focus area: The enterprises and companies we […]
Buyers Are Getting Better, Are Sellers?
I’ve been a huge fan of Hank Barne’s research on buying and buyer regret. Over years, he showed increasing frustration in buying teams, resulting in regret. The primary observations had been frustration over the buying process, less with solution selection. In Hank’s latest research he reports that buyers are getting better in navigating their buying process. Part of this is they are engaging more internal groups in their buying process. Hank’s hypothesis is buyers are recognizing they need help in their process, so they are engaging others in the organization to help them. They, also, are leveraging these other people […]
Gaming The Numbers
Some years ago, the leader of an outbound SDR team had set very aggressive call goals. This leader held the people accountable for making their goals, but they struggled. But one person consistently beat the goals. The leader held this individual up as a high performer. But when I started looking at the performance, I realized, despite consistently meeting the goals, the number of qualified leads this person was developing was about the same as his peers. I thought, “Why is this person significantly and consistently exceeding the call goals, but the results are mediocre?” I started listening to the […]
ChatGPT Takes The Stage, Imagining “HamletGPT”
There was a fascinating, probably overlooked, Superbowl commercial. It was GoDaddy’s, Act Like You Know commercial. It showed an actor thrust into a scene which he executes with great precision. One of the scenes was an actor driving, with authority, in a race. He was moving, with authority through the group of cars. Closeups showed him focusing on the race, steering a precise line, shifting, managing the precise heel and toe on the brake/clutch. The actor was masterful in these 5 seconds. Then it move to the outtakes, the actor was driving haphazardly on the course, not knowing how to […]
The Problem With Playbooks
We all have playbooks. Today, the Chiefs and Eagles will be using theirs, each in hope of winning the Super Bowl. In selling and GTM, we have our playbooks. Marketing has any number of them, SDRs, BDRs, AEs, AMs, Rev-ops/enablement, Customer service, all of us have our playbooks. All our leaders have their playbooks. Running a consulting organization, we have our own playbooks in finding/closing business, how we work with clients, in projects, and other areas. Each of us have our own personal playbooks on getting through the day—rise/shine, feed the cats, workout, two cups of coffee, journaling…… (at least […]
Win Rates, Are You Important To Your Customer?
Recently, I’ve been involved in a number of discussions about “Win Rates.” There’s a huge amount of misunderstanding on all aspects of Win Rates. Lots of misunderstanding about how you measure these. There have also been lots of discussions about “high win rates.” The majority of my clients, after we have identified and work the issues have very high win rates. Many in the 70 to high 80% range. Most, well over 50%. People are astounded, they think these clients might be doing something with the numbers, gaming them in some way to inflate their win rates. For many, these […]