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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
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 […]
“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 […]