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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
“Cheat Codes…..”
Every morning while I’m having my first coffee, I take a quick look at LinkedIn. I limit myself to 3 swipes on my IPhone. There are two dominant classes of content (discounting the increasing ads). The first is “My story….” These are either, “Here are the hardships I overcame….” or “I’ve made millions of dollars each year….” The other category are the “Cheat codes.” Cheat codes are presented by “experts,” claiming they have discovered the secrets to success, and they present those secrets as “cheat codes.” They cover everything you possibly could want. The secrets to cold emails, how to […]
Metrics Don’t Produce Revenue!
I continue to be stunned by the dashboards people show me. The variety of things we can track and measure is amazing. Add onto this, much of it is in real time. We no longer have to wait until the end of the week/month to get reports. I reflect back to the “old days,” imagine the stone ages of 10 years ago. Then, we might have had some pipeline reports and manually generated activity reports, and they were seldom in real time. Today it’s amazing. We can track where our customers/prospects are poking their noses on our websites, even other […]
“I’m Trying To Think, But Nothing Happens…..”
Too often, as I look at my feeds, or as I discuss many well intended enablement/training programs, or as I look at the technologies available to “help” our sellers, I’m reminded of the old Three Stooges scene where Curly is struggling, saying, “I’m trying to think but nothing happens!” While we genuinely seek to help our sellers improve their performance, there seem to be unintended consequences to what we are doing. And the data shows this, declining results across virtually every metric we see. The way we make up for the gaps is with a volume/velocity approach. “If what we […]
“They Responded To Our Outreach!!”
As you know, I participate in 100s of pipeline and deal reviews every year. One of my standard queries focuses on pipeline quality. It seems like such a simple/obvious question, but you’d be amazed at the amount of “hand waving” and confused responses I get. “How do you know this is a real deal? How do you know this is qualified?” You can guess a lot of the responses: “They seem to be interested in our solutions…. We’ve been having great conversations…. They responded to our outreach…..” I ask, “I get that, how do you know they are ready to […]
What About Quality?
As I peruse my feeds with insights from guru’s, I see all sorts of advice about increasing our outreach. Leveraging tools, ChatGPT, social channels. My various inboxes are filled with with offers for “more.” I am offered lists of thousands of prospects. We are inundated with data showing declining response rates, the solution to these is always “more.” What took 400-500 outreaches a few years ago, takes 1200-1500 today, and next year probably will be over 2500. As I sit in pipeline reviews, almost universally, the coaching is, “You need more,” followed by demands to 3X, 4X, 9X their pipelines. […]
What Are You Looking For In A Candidate?
Clients and colleagues frequently ask my opinion of people they are considering hiring. It’s often a request, “Dave, what do you think of each of these candidates? Who would you hire?” And the requests are accompanied with resumes, each extolling the fantastic accomplishments the candidate has achieved through their career. When asked this, I always reply, “What are you looking for?” The responses are always the same, “I want a high performer for this role…….” The roles vary, I’m asked my opinion on CRO Candidates, VPs, managers, Account Managers, and others. While I never respond with my knee jerk reaction, […]