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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
Fighting Fires……
Those of you who know that I live in California might be thinking, “Has Dave been impacted by the fires?” I’m in Northern CA, we do worry about fires (I have my go bag and lists at the ready), but I’m not directly impacted by the tragedy we see in Southern CA. This post is about the firefighting each of us seems to get sucked into every day. It was sparked, so to speak, by an email from the CRO of a client. We had a meeting scheduled to discuss a major strategic transformation she was guiding her team through. […]
The Continuing Decline Of Our Expectations…..
Over the past several weeks, I’ve been involved in a number of very disparate conversations. Mostly, focused on various aspects of our business, GTM, selling and other strategies. They all tended to look at various issues around performance, how we attract and engage customers, how we service and develop them. While each one of them has been fascinating, there has been a common underlying theme in all of them. And it’s made me extremely uncomfortable. I’ve started having conversations about this with a number of close friends and colleagues. “Are they seeing similar things? Are they as uncomfortable with what […]
Your Dashboards Are Useless, What Are Your 5 KPI’s?
As typical, I was sitting with a leadership team reviewing their performance. The RevOps exec, displayed the organization’s performance dashboard. We’ve all seen them, all sorts of graphics with dials, red lights, row after row of numbers. I counted, this dashboard was tracking over 30 items. There was lots of discussion about various numbers, usually the resolution was, “We have to do more….” Finally, the CRO asked for my view. I think I disappointed everyone, they thought I was going to present some keen insights about how to improve performance. Instead, I posed a single question? “What are the 5 […]
“It’s Not A Numbers Game, It’s A Human Game!”
Anyone entering into selling immediately sees the obsession we have with numbers. We are focused on hitting our revenue goals, not just by the end of the year, but quarterly and monthly. Recognizing revenue is a trailing metric, we become obsessed with things that tell us whether we will achieve those goals. We become obsessed with forecasts, pipelines, and their health. And that drives us to look at our prospecting and activity metrics. How many emails, how many calls, how many meetings, how many demos how many proposals, how many bathroom breaks………. And the gurus reinforce and intensify this. They […]
“If You Can’t Do It Yourself……”
“If you can’t do it yourself, you probably shouldn’t be using AI!” This was a brilliant observation by James Pursey in an outstanding seminar on AI in sales. The only modification I would make would be to say, “If you can’t do it excellently yourself, you probably shouldn’t be using AI!” James gets at the root of so many of the issues we see about the terrible use of LLMs in selling, marketing, customer service. We all have been the subject of the most horrible LLM generated emails, social media conversations, AI generated posts. Many have fallen victim to misstatements/hallucinations […]
Doing Our People’s Jobs……
One of the biggest mistakes I see too many managers make, is they dive in and start doing their people’s jobs. The motivations for this range from being well intended to malicious. We have all seen the managers believing they are the best sales people in the world, sweeping their people aside, playing “Superseller” in important customer calls. We see managers impatient with their people saying, “I can get this done faster….” We see well intended managers saying, “This is new, something we’ve never done before, I can probably get it done better than the people responsible for getting it […]