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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
What’s The Purpose Of A Pipeline Review?
I sit in dozens of pipeline reviews. They all tend to have the same format, someone displays a pipeline chart–sometimes a standard report in the CRM system, too often, an excel extract. The report typically has a list of deals, target close date (usually we are focusing on this month or this quarter), and expected deal value. The deals may be positioned in sales stages, with subtotals for the total value of the deals in each stage, and the total value of the deals in the pipeline. Then each manager reviews the pipeline. Typically, this is where the review goes […]
Acting On Purpose
“Purpose” is a foundational principle for success, yet we pay little attention to it. In times of crisis, purpose and purposefulness is how we navigate risk and uncertainty. Our purpose provides grounding, something that, when challenged, we come back to in trying to figure our path forward. Using Simon Sinek’s popular terminology, our purpose provides us our “Why?” We, sometimes, confuse our purpose with outcomes created in pursuit of our purpose. We, often, have no purpose. For example, “shareholder value” is not a purpose, neither is “making money,” “creating profitable growth.” But having a strong, focused purpose provides us the […]
Who Is Your Customer?
Knowing our customers, focusing on defining who they are, what they are trying to achieve, how we help them is critical to our success. Staying focused on these customers–the one’s we help the most, and with whom we are most successful, our ICP is critical. Yet too often, as we look at our marketing, prospecting, and our pipelines, we attempt to reach everyone that fogs a mirror. If we are challenged to “find more,” rather than focus on where we have the biggest impact–narrowing our search for prospects, we cast a wider net, inflicting meaningless messages on customers we can’t […]
What Will We Take Forward From This Situation?
I’m about 10 weeks into my own Covid 19 lockdown. I have to admit to some Zoom weariness, impatience with not jumping on a plane and meeting with clients face to face, even a nice dinner at a restaurant with friends. But we will continue with some version of the lockdown for some time. It’s been an interesting time. Many look forward to things getting back to normal, to the way they were Before Covid (BC) As I reflect on the past several months, there’s a lot I/we have learned that I hope we don’t lose. There’s a lot we’ve […]
“I’m Selling As Hard As I Can, Why Aren’t You Buying?”
The universal lament of sales people is, “Why aren’t my customers buying? I’m busting my ass selling to them?” We make dozens of prospecting calls, send hundreds of emails. We find customers with some level of interest, then do everything we can to convince the customers to buy our products. We train ourselves about our products, become masters at pitching them and comparing them favorably with the competition. We spend hours mastering the “killer demo.” We know how to handle every objection, we’ve mastered closing techniques. Some few of us have even understood the customers’ businesses a little, translating our […]
An Unprecedented Opportunity
The current pandemic and financial crises create an unprecedented opportunity to engage our customers in high value and impact ways. In normal times, helping the customer understand and committing to change is, often, the biggest challenge. It is human nature to resist change. Unless the pain of doing nothing is greater than the pain of change, the rational decision for many is to do nothing. Too often, our customers my not recognize the need to change or have no sense of urgency around changing. Today, our own organizations, our suppliers, our customers, our competitors all face a changed world. For […]