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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
Are You Important To Your Customer?
I have to admit, and apologize to a few folks, I lost it in a meeting today. We were talking about an account strategy. The sales person wanted to meet with the top executives of a very large corporation. I’d been asked to help strategize this and help figure out how they attract the attention to the top executives. “How is what you do important to these executives?” I asked. “Well they spend a lot of money on us,” replied the sales person, “They should be interested in talking to us.” “I know they are one of our largest customers, […]
Stop Wasting Time Prospecting!
95% of our prospecting is just wasted time, so just stop it! It’s too much time to find that 5% who want to talk, and if they really do, they’ll reach out to you anyway, inbound is so much easier. Think about all the time you are wasting. You are sending those 1000’s of emails–granted, it doesn’t really take that much time, you’ve automated it. You only have to hit a few keys and you can send 100’s of emails to unsuspecting people. “Dave, I’d like to tell you about our products….” You follow those with phone calls, that’s much […]
Are We Having The Right Conversations?
I was talking to a great sales person the other day. We’ve been talking for several months about how to improve his prospecting. In our last discussion, he said, “Things have changed completely, I’m now having the right conversations with my prospects!” It’s a common challenge, we struggle to get our customers to respond, we struggle to engage, we don’t make the progress we hope for. The problem is we usually focus on our agenda, the things we want to talk about. Too often, that’s about what our company does and what our products do. Sometimes, we present these in […]
September 11, 2021
Today, we will read dozens of heartfelt remembrances of 20 years ago. I’ve already read a few from friends who were supposed to be in those buildings at the time. Their writing brings back stark memories. I spent the first 12 formative years of my career in Manhattan. Through the 80’s much of my time was spent “downtown” in the financial district. For a couple of years, I actually had an office in Tower1. Windows on the World was a favorite gathering spot. The conference center on the floors immediately adjacent were places both Kookie and I spent lots of […]
“But We’re Making Our Number…..”
Recently, I had an interesting conversation with an executive. It was a large organization. By most measures, it was extremely successful. Year after year of good (perhaps not great) revenue growth, good profitability. They checked all the boxes the financial markets tend to care about and it was reflected in their stock price. But the executive was uncomfortable. As we peeled back his concerns and started looking at the data, we discovered some interesting things: Sales/revenues had been growing very nicely. But win rates were in the 20-25% range for qualified opportunities. Interestingly, this was driven less by losing to […]
The Wentworth Prospect
I get the chance to preview dozens of books on sales, marketing and business. Most have unique ideas, I always learn from them. Every once in a while one stands out. The Wentworth Prospect by John Smibert, Wayne Moloney, and Jeff Clulow is stunning! When I started on the first page, I was suddenly caught up in a mystery. It was a novel, filled with an intriguing story about “Sue,” and her challenges selling a major deal. As with many stories, she face adversity, challenges. There are characters that were trying to make Sue fail, there were supporters. New challenges […]