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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
Thinking About Retention, Renewal, Expansion Differently
It is human nature to look at things from our own points of view. But it’s restricting our thinking in those ways that blinds us to things that are changing around us, threats, opportunities, challenges, disruptions. Retention, renewal, expansion is key to our success with customers. We want to create customers for life! We want to have the continue to buy from us. It may be upgrading to our latest product, for example going from the IPhone 15 to the anticipated IPhone 16. It may be renewing subscriptions to current products, keeping them using our products forever. It may be […]
The Conundrum Of “Freeing Up Time,” Part 2
Time management is always an issue, and with everyone. We leverage tools, techniques, technologies that are supposed to make us more efficient and to free up time. But we still struggle. I wrote about the challenge high performers face in “The Conundrum Of Freeing Up Time, Part 1.” This post focuses on how we look at this issue with medium and low performers. In the past two decades, we have been overwhelmed with technologies that focus on improving the efficiency of our people. In the past two years AI tools have accelerated this. We can generate more emails in a […]
The Conundrum Of “Freeing Up Time,” Part 1
We, rightfully, constantly seek to free up time. Yesterday, coaching an executive, the key issue was “freeing up time.” For such a senior executive, to some it might seem surprising, but it comes up in virtually every conversation I have, at every level of the organization. It’s interesting, I see two, almost diametrically oppose, things happening when we look to free up time. One is, despite the time that is freed up, there are always more demands on our time than time available. It’s characteristic of the busiest but most productive people I encounter and seems to be a persistent […]
The Erosion Of Our Expectations…..
Long time followers know I spend a lot of time advising telcom companies around the world–equipment manufacturers, service providers, others. When I first started working closely with them in the 90’s. quality of service was one of the most critical issues for each one. What attracted and retained customers was the quality of each voice call–the clarity and accuracy of the voices, time lags, stability of the connection, static, all sorts of thins. For data, there were similar concerns about quality of service. When I started working with them, I wondered about this obsession, thinking, “Is it really that important?” […]
What If We Assumed Indecision/Uncertainty Is Pervasive?
Ted McKenna blew me away in a conversation today. He posed the question, “What if indecision is always there?” It got my mind spinning. We’ve not paid much attention to indecision, and I’ll add uncertainty. Too often we, me included, have tended to be “just the facts” oriented. We help people identify what they are trying to do, we help them understand they issues that impact them, how they might look at them. We help them identify the opportunity cost for not taking action to address their potential fear of change. We help them navigate the buying process, ultimately to […]
The Problem With Sales Math, A Thought Experiment
The answer to every seller’s dream is more volume. “If we only had more leads, we could have more top of funnel, which produces more opportunities, …….” We have the algorithms that help us identify what we need to achieve our goals. Simplistically, “X top of funnel produces Y revenue.” For whatever revenue goal we have, we calculate the top of funnel required to achieve that goal. If we want to double our revenue, we have to double top of funnel. If we want to quadruple revenue, we quadruple top of funnel. Math works! From this basic equation, we know […]