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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
Where’s The Passion?
As the year comes to a close, I find myself in a lot of conversations combining both reflection on what has happened and forward looking perspectives on the coming year. There’s a common element to these conversations–the people that reach out to me tend to share similar mindsets to mine. That common element is best described as “passion.” While the word never surfaces, it underlies each of these conversations. With some it’s expressed as extreme competitiveness. For example, this past Friday, I had a conversation with a long time client who leads one of the highest performing organizations in their […]
Customers Can’t Tell You What They Need!
I think since the first book on selling was ever written, we have internalized the discovery process. In this process, we focus on understanding the customer needs. We have endless lists, of questions to discover our customers needs. Most of these questions are biased to features and capabilities of our products. These need questions tend to focus on the solution, naturally. Our discovery processes tend to focus on the capabilities of the solution, which is what we care about. The problem with this solution focused discovery process, is we only engage the customer once they have gone through the majority […]
“Cheat Codes…..”
Every morning while I’m having my first coffee, I take a quick look at LinkedIn. I limit myself to 3 swipes on my IPhone. There are two dominant classes of content (discounting the increasing ads). The first is “My story….” These are either, “Here are the hardships I overcame….” or “I’ve made millions of dollars each year….” The other category are the “Cheat codes.” Cheat codes are presented by “experts,” claiming they have discovered the secrets to success, and they present those secrets as “cheat codes.” They cover everything you possibly could want. The secrets to cold emails, how to […]
Metrics Don’t Produce Revenue!
I continue to be stunned by the dashboards people show me. The variety of things we can track and measure is amazing. Add onto this, much of it is in real time. We no longer have to wait until the end of the week/month to get reports. I reflect back to the “old days,” imagine the stone ages of 10 years ago. Then, we might have had some pipeline reports and manually generated activity reports, and they were seldom in real time. Today it’s amazing. We can track where our customers/prospects are poking their noses on our websites, even other […]
“I’m Trying To Think, But Nothing Happens…..”
Too often, as I look at my feeds, or as I discuss many well intended enablement/training programs, or as I look at the technologies available to “help” our sellers, I’m reminded of the old Three Stooges scene where Curly is struggling, saying, “I’m trying to think but nothing happens!” While we genuinely seek to help our sellers improve their performance, there seem to be unintended consequences to what we are doing. And the data shows this, declining results across virtually every metric we see. The way we make up for the gaps is with a volume/velocity approach. “If what we […]
“They Responded To Our Outreach!!”
As you know, I participate in 100s of pipeline and deal reviews every year. One of my standard queries focuses on pipeline quality. It seems like such a simple/obvious question, but you’d be amazed at the amount of “hand waving” and confused responses I get. “How do you know this is a real deal? How do you know this is qualified?” You can guess a lot of the responses: “They seem to be interested in our solutions…. We’ve been having great conversations…. They responded to our outreach…..” I ask, “I get that, how do you know they are ready to […]