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
“Activities Don’t Drive Strategy!”
Brandon Fluharty made a brilliant observation: Activities Don’t Drive Strategy! While no leader sets out to have activities drive strategy (at least I hope they don’t), too often we get distracted and activities take center stage. Stated differently, we stop seeing the forest and focus on the trees. Activities are the things we do to execute our strategies. Our strategies define our overall goals, our target markets, how we create value with the customers, how we differentiate our offerings, what we are trying to achieve with our customers and for our organization. Activities are the things we do to execute […]
Loss Aversion…..
None of us like to lose! As sellers, we expect tough competition and challenges, but we are driven to win. There’s a sense of well deserved pride to see a customer select us as the best of all the alternatives. While a nuanced idea, sometimes, we may be less focused on winning, more focused on not losing. It seems our aversion to losing is, often, higher than our desire to win. Sometimes this loss aversion is manifested by sellers not chasing the tough but winnable deals. Sometimes, we see exactly the opposite, we see sellers chasing deals that aren’t winnable. […]
When Deals Stall……
When deals stall it’s a sign that something has to change! All of us have experienced stalled deals. It’s frustrating, we’re anxious for the customer to move forward in their buying process. We’re anxious to close the deal! Deals can stall for all sorts of reasons. Customers may lose their sense of urgency. Their attention may have been diverted to other priorities. They may simply get lost in their buying process. I review hundreds of deals and pipelines every year. I see thousands of stalled deals. Too often, the deals are stalled because of sellers! Let’s dive into some of […]
Reflecting On “Founder Mode”
Since Paul Graham’s fascinating article on Founder Mode, I’ve been reading/rereading his article and listening to Brian Chesky talk about his re-wiring of AirBnB. I’ve also been wary of way too many pundits jumping on the bandwagon with their thoughts about Founder Mode as the miracle cure to our business woes. (Let me be clear, neither Paul, nor Brian talk about it in that way.) I have to confess, it took me some time to wrap my head around what they were talking about. Part of it was the jargon around “Founder” and “Manager” modes. Part of it was my […]
RevOps Can And Must Do Better!
It’s “strategic planning season” for many companies. I sit in countless discussions and reviews, led by RevOps teams. They are presenting the strategic goals and numbers for the coming year. In addition, there have been a lot of RevOps conferences, where these leaders talk about developing the function. While none of these discussions have been “wrong,” I worry that so much more can be accomplished. Too many discussions are about the numbers and doing the math. RevOps teams have access to data and analytics many of us never imagined possible. In discussing the strategic goals for the organization, most take […]
The “Things We Don’t Want To Do”
Regardless our role, there are certain aspects of our jobs we don’t like. They are the things we don’t like or want to do. They vary for each of us. For individual contributors, it may be prospecting, admin tasks, researching our customers, managing our pipelines, dealing with all the minutiae of moving deals forward, and on and on For managers, it may be hiring, coaching, dealing with poor performers, understanding performance data, and on and on. We may simply not do those things, even though they need to be done. Alternatively, we may seek others to do those things we […]