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.
We seem to be metric crazy. Every organization I meet has a whole alphabet soup of metrics. Terms like ACV, MRR, ARR, TCV, LTV, CAC, Churn, Retention, Bookings, Revenue, Quota Attainment, SQL, MQL, Conversions, ATV, Win Rates, Velocity, Customer Growth, Product Growth, Share, Onboarding Time, % of people at quota, Voluntary/Involuntary Attrition, CRM Utilization, Pipeline Loading, Account Planning, Dials, Appointments, Proposals, Customer Meetings, Demos, Time spent per call, Number of questions per call, Types of questions per call, on and on and on. Vanity metrics like number of cups of coffee a day and time spent in the bathroom per […]
Read MoreMentoring takes all forms, some of the more unusual are the most helpful, particularly in my experience. Through my own career, I have had a number of “formal mentors.” Early in my career, in addition to great managers who coached my day to day performance, I was assigned to very senior executives in my company. We would have formal discussions, monthly, and every once in a while they would invite me to participate (most often as a fly on the wall) in key meetings they conducted. These experiences helped me learn and helped me gain broader perspectives about business. They […]
Read MoreI was struggling to meet with a sales manager. He really wanted to talk, we had critical issues he had asked for help in addressing. He kept postponing our calls, “Dave, I’m running all out, I’ve really got to be out in the field closing business for my people…..” We finally had our meeting. I started the meeting asking, “Bill, how’d all those deals go, did you close them…..” Bill went on and on, using a lot of our meeting time, talking about the meetings and his finesse in closing deal after deal. Of course there were a few that […]
Read MoreA client/friend and I had just completed a number of reviews with his team. As with most pipelines I see, many of these people’s were anemic. They just didn’t have enough opportunities to enable them to achieve their goals. Even if they won 100% of the opportunities in their pipelines, they would fall far short. We asked, “What are you going to do? How are you going to get your people to generate more opportunities?” There was a lot of hand wringing, hemming and hawing. They knew they needed to prospect, but as many of us think, it’s just such […]
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