Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
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.
As part of my client work, I often immerse myself in data. In looking at the win-loss reports, I’m always driven to look at the “loss reasons.” You know that field, it’s the convenient drop down in your CRM and you can select one of several alternatives. While there are usually CRM fields that allow more of an explanation, those are almost always blank. In doing the analysis, 99% of the time, the reason for the loss is “Price!” Very rarely, do I see “Product fit,” or “We screwed up.” Though I’ve never seen that latter option in any of […]
Read MoreLeveraging buyer signals has become a fascinating topic in trying to understand buyer intent. Where before we relied on people responding to an email, accepting a meeting invitation, inviting others to the meeting as being signals indicating interest and, sometimes, intent. Now we can monitor tens of thousands of signals. We can look at every outreach across every channel to people in an organization. We can monitor opens, forwards, re-opens. We can monitor downloads and shares. We can look at every website hit. We can look at the complete past history of all of these. Taken individually, they may not […]
Read MoreThe whole purpose of every GTM organization is to convince our customers to change. Whether it’s a new way of doing things, an ability to address a new opportunity, or replacing what they currently use with our own products. Everything we do is oriented around helping our customers challenge the status quo, build the case for action, create urgency, manage risk, develop confidence in their change initiative. Yet when we go back to our own organizations, we continue to do things the same way we always have done them. The same approach to market, the same emails, the same calls, […]
Read MoreMy father had an expression: “Do as I say, not as I do.” Usually, it surfaced I was at my most obnoxious. When he called me on it, I’d fire back, “Well, you do the same thing!” He’d patiently try to show me the error of my ways, how I might change. But I was a difficult kid. I’d keep arguing, taunting him with the unfairness of it. (The truth is, his lapses were rare—almost always a moment when he was frustrated or worn thin. I just had a talent for cataloging them.) He only said “Do as I say, […]
Read MoreI was doing a thought experiment with a team a few days ago. I thought I’d extend it to this audience. Before I do, I recently listened to an interview with Christopher Nolan about his latest movie, The Odyssey. They were filming the whole thing in IMAX, which presented monstrous problems for the speaking parts of the production. In considering how he addressed it he said, “The limitations give everybody a focus.” File that away as we walk through the exercise. The team sold software-based technology tools. While their performance was reasonable, it wasn’t where they wanted it to be. […]
Read More