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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
Leadership And Judgment
We’ve all been in the meeting. It’s a standard deal review. The manager sits with the seller, both looking at the dashboard, rather than each other. The are reviewing the deal, MEDDICC steps checked off, process being followed. Maybe a few questions about what the customer is saying, and how the salesperson is handling things. Some updates are made in CRM. Perhaps, next steps are agreed on. 30 minutes, the meeting is over. The manager goes back to the dashboard; the seller goes back to spraying and praying. A status review. What did the manager learn? What did the seller […]
Stop Wasting Seller Time On Forecasting, Start Spending It On Winning!
If I look at my feeds, too many conversations with clients and others, we have an obsession on forecasting. I’m constantly astounded by the amount of time sellers spend in forecast reviews with their managers, and management meetings around the forecast. I wonder if it is time well spent. I wonder if it’s time that will actually have a positive impact on the revenue actually booked. Don’t get me wrong, forecasts are important. It’s not just something that helps us project whether we will hit our goals. But the organization depends on it. The CEO and CFO have to set […]
Are We Designing Judgment Out?
I’ve been doing a series of articles about judgment, What It Is, The Costs Of Losing Judgment. This article is likely to hit home to many leaders, managers, Rev-Ops folks. I want to focus on the issue, are we designing judgment out of the work. This isn’t an argument against playbooks, scripts, dashboards, process, or the tools/AI we use. It’s a discussion of the evolution of how we use these tools. In theory, each of these can be designed to help people develop better judgment. A playbook based on our past experiences with similar situations, helps me think about what’s […]
“Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me……..”
Recently, I sat in an AI for Sales conference. It was outstanding. But there was a demo portion of the conference where various vendors were talking about how their tools “helped” sellers. We know the stories, do the research, do the prep, manage the calendars, send the follow-up, do the prospecting, handle the inbound. The lists of the things these tools do is astounding. All of these are intended to free sellers up, focusing on customers. Throughout the workshop, a theme kept coming up. Not AI helping sellers or relieving them of menial tasks. The emerging theme was “AI in […]
The Cost Of Not Developing Judgment
In my last post, I focused on Judgment, what it is, the development cycle. But one could just say, “Yeah Dave, I get it, but so what……?” The “so what” is the cost of not developing our judgment. But it doesn’t stop at our own judgment. There are costs at the team and organizational level. They ripple through to our inability to achieve our goals. Finally, and perhaps the biggest costs accrue to our customers. But before I get into this, I have to lay the groundwork. In the previous article I said we are always exercising judgment. It can […]
Judgment Starts Where The Analysis Runs Out
Over the past months, I’ve been obsessed with writing about judgment. Whether it is what AI leaves to humans. Or that leaders exercise in developing their teams. Or the judgment an individual exercises in the moment of engagement with a customer. Judgment is the differentiator in how we get things done when uncertainty and risk exists. After all these posts, I realized I’ve talked about the word but never spent any time talking about what judgement is. First, I did something unusual, I went to the dictionaries: · Cambridge Dictionary: the ability to make decisions or to make good decisions, […]
