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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
Confident, Decisive, And Wrong!
Every leader I know has more information than they can handle. Dashboards, pipeline reviews, forecast calls, win/loss reports, it never stops. We have more tools and AI to provide more analysis and new insights into this flood of information. Despite this, for the decisions that matter most, those about strategy, people, customers, and execution, it seems these are going the wrong direction, constantly eroding performance. Win rates continue to decline. Fewer people hit their goals. Too often, the wrong people get blamed. We double down on initiatives despite results showing us they are failing. We celebrate hitting the numbers while […]
We’re Asking The Wrong Question About AI And Jobs
Every week, we are deluged with articles about the impact of AI on jobs and employment, particularly the disappearance of entry-level roles. Senior executives announce headcount reductions. Analysts publish projections. The concern is real. Data points are cherry-picked; entry-level coding, legal research, consultants dedicated to generating excel charts and powerpoints, accounting/finance, HR, and the list goes on. In GTM, we see junior level marketing, selling, and customer service jobs being displaced with AI agents. What’s missing in all of this celebratory hand-wringing are the serious questions about what’s actually happening and what it means to the future of organizations. If […]
Do We Even Need A Sales Process?
If no one is using our sales processes, do we even need them? Are we just wasting a lot of time? I’ve argued for years that every buyer’s situation is different, every decision process is different. Given that, maybe a sales process is just a distraction. Maybe it’s slowing us down. Maybe it just doesn’t matter. When I work with clients, they always talk about their sales process. Salespeople update CRM, mostly because their managers want to inspect the pipeline and make the forecast. But when I start asking about specific deals; why is this one in this stage, what’s […]
The SaaS Sales Factory Is Broken
Look at most SaaS organizations today and you’ll hear the same language. Activities, velocity, scaling, predictable revenue. The underlying design has always been to build a selling factory; standardized inputs, consistent throughput, scalable output, predictable revenue. Sales strategists and leaders cite Lean Manufacturing and the Toyota Production System as the inspiration. They talk about the principles, having only read the books, but not understanding what drove the success of Lean and TPS in manufacturing. They believed the selling/buying process was simply another assembly line. Taiichi Ohno, Eiji Toyoda, and W. Edwards built something that turned traditional manufacturing processes upside down. […]
We’ve Built The Scoreboard, But Forgotten The Game.
Somewhere along the way, we replaced the mission, our outcomes, with the metric. What gets our attention are the scoreboards and dashboards, instead of what we are trying to achieve. It’s happened gradually, disguised as data-driven management. We built dashboards. We set targets. We tracked performance. And in that process, we got lost. The metric was never supposed to be the point. It was supposed to tell us whether we were on the path to achieving our goals, executing the mission. Instead, it became the focal point. We forgot about the outcomes and the mission entirely. Watch what managers focus […]
Are We Using the Same Map?
Every seller has a map. It’s called a sales process. It has stages, milestones, and exit criteria. It tells sellers where they are, what they should be doing, and where they’re headed. In theory, it’s a GPS for getting from first conversation to a closed deal. While they have this “map/GPS,” based on their best experience, too often, they ignore it. They know a better way, they know the short-cuts, or “this situation is different. Instead of using the map, they “know better,” navigating by instinct. Sometimes instinct works. More often, it produces a longer, less efficient path. Or the […]