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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
Consistently High Performing Organizations
I suspect it’s trite to say, every leader wants to create a high performance organization or that people want to be part of high performing organizations. But what does it mean to be a high performing organization? In selling, is high performance “hitting our numbers?” Is it max’ing our comp plans? Is it about our personal success? While those are aspects of performance, when we assess the data research shows us, the majority of individuals and organizations are failing at this. Despite all the investments made in tools, technology, training; despite our leveraging all the fashions and miracle cures we […]
The Spaces In Between…..
Recently, I’ve been noticing something new, something I haven’t been paying sufficient attention to. It struck me in a conversation with a colleague yesterday. We were talking about organizational design, performance, and a number of issues. She presented a chart, the one below is a cleaned up representation of the chart. The content of the chart is irrelevant to this discussion, but each block represented a different part of the GTM organization, their roles, responsibilities, and key metrics. We were talking about this in the context of organizational performance. But we can look at similar block diagrams we use to […]
Maybe We Are Looking At Sales Productivity Incorrectly….
It seems like everything I read about sales productivity is focused on doing more. I see all sorts of insights, sage advice, and technology that helps improve our productivity and efficiency. These offer the potential of freeing up time. But it’s interesting how we fill the time we theoretically gain. It seems we fill the time doing more of that same stuff, rather than doing other things that may be neglected, or for which we have not enough time. We have tools that improve our productivity in generating emails, making calls, outreach to prospects. But what do we do with […]
“Why I’m Interested In Selling,” Simon Frewer
Preface: Simon Frewer‘s and my relationship goes back several lifetimes. I first met Simon when he ran the sales and delivery organizations for CEB around the Challenger Methodology. We had fascinating discussions on the pro/cons of Challenger. Since those early days, Simon and I have become great friends, sharing ideas and viewpoints. I found myself chuckling as I read Simon’s thoughts. I suspect everyone else contributing to this series had some of the same feelings about responding to my request. But in his humor, Simon makes an important point. “Selling” is part of everything we do, whether it’s asking our […]
Do We Really Understand “As A Service?”
“As A Service,” particularly SaaS has become the “fashion” in business over the past decade. While everyone touts the subscription or term payment models as new and innovative, they have existed for decades, minimally. When I was selling mainframe computers (back around the time when the wheel was invented), I could only offer a subscription payment. Customer could choose to sign contracts for several years, but they couldn’t purchase them outright. Like today’s offerings, ongoing maintenance, service, support were built into the monthly pricing the customer paid. The customer could upgrade, and the monthly fee would be adjusted for that […]
Late To The Party……
It’s always a bummer to show up late to the party. The best drinks are gone, all that’s left is the cheap beer. One is left with picking a few crumbs of potato chips from the bottom a the bowl, all the good food has been eaten. And the most interesting people and most interesting conversation are all gone. The people that remain are exhausted, not interested in talking more, they just want to escape. Desperately, we try to find someone to talk to, something interesting to talk about, but…… It seems so much of “modern” selling looks like this. […]