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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
The “Problem Focused” ICP
“We” tend to be very sloppy in our definition and focus on our Ideal Customer Profile. Yet it is probably the single most important thing to producing results. We tend to define the functions that may be the purchasers/users of our solutions. “We sell IT solutions to CIOs and their teams.” “We sell sales/marketing solutions, to CROs and their teams.” “We sell financial solutions to CFOs and their teams.” But every IT exec, CRO, CFO probably don’t fit our ICPs. We may refine it to, “We sell solutions to CFOs in financial services companies.” But that’s a big space, it […]
Maybe We Have Things “Inside/Out….”
I’ve been engaged in a number of diverse conversations about our GTM strategies and the challenges so many organizations face in achieving their goals. The conversations have ranged from our overall approach to engaging customers based on lean manufacturing models, to the future of SDRs, to how do we improve win rates/deal strategies, to account growth. Other than the deep frustration people have in the issue of “What used to work is no longer working,” or “Everything is broken,” there has been a common thread through all these conversations. The thinking has been an “Inside/Out” approach. What does this mean? […]
How Manufacturing Works, Applying It To Selling
For some reason, there’s a huge attraction to applying “manufacturing techniques” to selling. I suspect it’s the perceived orderliness to manufacturing processes and the predictability of the outcome. It’s easy to understand that attraction. The lean approaches applied to manufacturing create a hyper efficient process. Second, it always produces the same outcome (manufacturing experts will quibble, but we do design manufacturing lines to produce zero defects.) While most lean manufacturing is a “pull” process, we know that whatever we feed into the beginning of that manufacturing line will produce a very precise outcome/output. Experienced manufacturing people, please forgive me, I’ll […]
“Something’s Happening Here, What It Is Ain’t Exactly Clear…”
I’ve been in various businesses in a variety of jobs for close to 4 decades. I’m experiencing and observing something I’ve never encountered. Over the last several weeks, I’ve had a number of conversations–some I initiated, some initiated by others. Conversations with clients, colleagues, business friends. We are all seeing similar things, each from different perspectives. It’s very difficult to describe or put words to it. But it’s something each of is is sensing. We struggle with describing it. We struggle with “What do we do about it?” Most of those I speak with have been through all sorts of […]
Selling Math, Can We Do Better?
We focus on scaling and growth. We revel in incredible growth rates, doing better than we did last year, having aspirations to do better next year than we did this year. We are hitting the numbers, maxing our comp plans, keeping our investors happy. We engage in high fives and chest bumping all around. Of course, that it getting more and more difficult. Fewer are doing this, and it is never easy. We struggle to do more and more, leveraging technology to help get us on target. What if we hit pause and started doing some math? What if we […]
Are Methodologies Even Relevant Anymore?
I read a fascinating discussion about the relevance/utility of sales methodologies. There were people with very good arguments on both sides. I have to confess, very early in my career, I didn’t pay much attention to the methodology we were supposed to use. Part of it was my arrogance, I thought I could come up with better and more relevant approaches than any standard methodology. I had some reasonable success “doing my own thing.” But, as I ran into difficult situations, where I had no experience or idea how to move forward, I found myself falling back on the methodology. […]