Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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 Curious About Who Your Customer Is?
It seems odd to write a post for sales professionals (and unprofessionals), posing the question, “Are You Curious About Who Your Customer Is?” After all, we read endless drivel about the importance of relationships and people. But, sadly, too many sales people don’t really care about who their customers are. Sure, they look them up on LinkedIn, Facebook, or other social platforms, trying to find clues about how to have that first prospecting conversation. I get endless notes, trying to “engage me,” “I see you are in the manufacturing industry…” I’m not, though many of my clients are manufacturers. Or, […]
Forecasts Are About The Deals, Not The Number!
This is one of those topics I wish I could just put to bed and ignore–yet it keeps rearing it’s ugly head. We continue to get forecasting wrong, at least for complex B2B sales. We keep making the forecast about the number, for example, this quarter we are going to make $1B! Not long ago, I was analyzing the forecasting process for a very large organization. I looked at the forecast at the beginning of each quarter for the past 3 years. Then I looked at the results achieved at the end of the quarter. The management team was reasonably […]
Trick Or Treat?
I realize it’s 2 weeks past Halloween, but I am compelled to write this post. So much of the discussion about selling and marketing seems to focus on “the tricks” of engaging customers. For example, a friend recently called my attention to a discussion, about how much time a sales person should ask for a discussion. It turns out reply rates are 61% higher for 5-10 minutes, versus 20-30 minutes. This attracted over 100 comments (as of this writing), mostly saying, “fantastic data,” others offering small refinements, “6 minutes and 37 seconds is optimal.” OK I made that up, but […]
“Are We There Yet?”
Recently, I was on a road trip. I knew where I needed to end up and what time I had to be there. Before leaving, I looked at Google Maps, got a rough idea of how to go and how much time I should allow. I sent the destination to my car, so the nav system could guide me on the best route. I was a little worried, I saw there was some construction, and the weather report said there might be snow over the mountains. So I added a little more time to make sure I reached my destination […]
Project Management And Sales Methodology
Recently, I wrote, The Next-Gen Sales Methodology. In it, I posited that project management and problem solving methods are core to a much more modern sales methodology. Be sure to read that, to understand the thinking and rationale. Let’s first understand the basics of project management. Project management is basically a work plan/process that enables us to accomplish our objectives in a disciplined, effective, and efficient manner. In good project plans, we identify a goal we want to achieve and a target completion date. For example, we might have a project to design and launch a mobile phone. We establish […]
What Does This Metric Mean To Me?
We measure a lot of stuff in sales. We have all sorts of pipeline metrics, activity metrics, prospecting metrics, account, territory, retention, renewal, mix, margin, and endless other metrics. We have an entire alphabet soup of metrics, including MQL, SQL, ARR, ACV, TCV, NPS, MRR, LTV, CAC, Churn, and XYZ (OK, I made that up—I think). We couldn’t manager our personal or organizational performance, without metrics, though, I’ve observed we tend to have too many metrics, and those that we have, we too often misunderstand. Metrics are really just some sort of alert. They can tell us, we are on […]