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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
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 […]
My “Tom Morris” Weekend
The first Saturday every month, my friend/mentor, Ned Miller and I have a conversation. There’s no agenda, it’s a mix of light conversation along with, “what do you think about…..,” or “how do we drive massive change in this area…..” The conversation is always about an hour, always, I have a lot to think about after the discussion. This morning, a third person joined us, Tom Morris. Ned had been having similar discussions with Tom and invited Tom to join us this morning. I had been aware of Tom, he’s a prolific writer. Several people have suggested I download his […]
Value Realization, Value Positioning, Value Creation
As sales and marketing people, the concept of “Value Proposition” has become fundamental in our positioning in our markets and with our customers. The concept of the value proposition can be traced back, apparently, to a McKinsey paper written in 1988, and to Norton and Kaplan’s work in the early 90’s (I was surprised by this, I thought the concept predated this by some years.) But value propositions have become almost another feature we talk about in pitching our products and company. Take a moment, search your website and those of your competition. Inevitably you will find the “value proposition” […]
“How Will This Initiative Be ‘Gamed'”
I spend my time with clients thinking about and implementing major change initiatives. We pour over data, have workshops on what we need to do, how to do it, risks, metrics, implementation plans. Ultimately, we come up with a launch program. At that point, I stick a monkey wrench into the process, sometimes frustrating the client who wants to move forward. I ask two questions: “What’s in it for the people we are inflicting this change on?” (Usually, it’s the sales people.) “How are they going to ‘game’ this?” Often, the responses are something like, “They need to do these […]