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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
Is AI That Good, Or Are We That Bad?
The answer to the question, “Is AI that good, or are we that bad,” is resounding YES! To both. Everyday, we see great applications of AI, particularly when coupled with outstanding human based thinking. At the same time, I see endless examples where AI isn’t doing anything better, it isn’t outthinking sellers, it’s simply outperforming sellers in fundamentals. It outperforms them in the things they should be doing, but simply aren’t, or they are doing them poorly. What we see is a knowing-doing gap in how so many sellers and GTM professionals work. We know what we should be doing […]
Shit We Have To Stop!
This week, two separate conversations with CROs. Completely different markets/industries, both high performing in their segments. But they were deeply frustrated. “We’re struggling to make our numbers!” As we dove into it, their markets were OK, customers were still growing and investing. Then we dove into the data, pipelines very anemic, but win rates, average deal sizes, sales cycles were reasonable. “What are they doing to find and qualify new opportunities? Where are they struggling with their prospecting?” I asked. As we reviewed it, their teams were doing pretty good jobs, there were some areas of improvement, but it seemed […]
Why Cheatsheets And Hacks Don’t Deliver
My feeds in social media are filled with Cheatsheets, Hacks, Templates—all sorts of tools. They attract lots of interest, lots of requests. People are looking for anything they can do to help them do their jobs, to find the shortcuts or secrets to success. I look at them, most are pretty good, there are always interesting ideas and approaches. But there’s a problem with them……… They don’t really work. Let me revise that, they work extraordinarily well for the people that develop them. But they aren’t as effective, ultimately don’t work for everyone else. People read them, perhaps try them, […]
Where Is The Customer?
I speak with lots of leaders about their GTM strategies. My social channels are dominated by experts suggesting the GTM strategies. One of the things I’ve started doing is counting how many times they use the word, “Customer.” It’s surprising how seldom the word is used. When it is, it’s used in the context of the customer being the target of a set of strategies and activities. But most of the time, it seems the word, Customer, is a distraction from what we are trying to do. We define outreach programs, looking at content, channel, volume, velocity. We set goals […]
Hunting? Farming? Funting?
Just as a humorous preface, I wanted to write about our mistaken impressions of Hunting and Farming. I wanted to suggest both co-exist, both in new and current accounts. So I was looking at how I might combine the concepts into one word. At first I came up with Harming—which I discarded for very obvious reasons. That left me with with the concept of Funting. I’m not totally satisfied with this, and am open to suggestions. The concepts of hunting and farming have classically been applied to the acquisition of new customer logos and how we manage those customers/logos once […]
What’s Easy Isn’t Always Good For Us!
The human brain is wired for convenience, speed, efficiency and how to get the most done for the least effort. Individually and organizationally we are drawn to short cuts, hacks. We leverage technologies, including AI/LLMs to offload the mundane and make us more efficient. We discount/cutting our prices, because it’s easier than helping customer understand our value co-creation. We continue to do meaningless email/voice/social outreach, because it’s easier than figuring out what customers really care about and how to engage them impactfully. We wait for our customers to engage us, if they do, at the very end of the buying […]