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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
You Don’t Fix Pipeline Problems In The Pipeline!
One of the biggest mistakes sales managers and sales people make is spending too much time focusing on the health of the pipeline. Managers are constantly holding pipeline reviews. They are constantly asking, “What’s changed since we reviewed the pipeline yesterday?” (You can see how tedious these constant reviews are, particularly if you have a long sales cycle (anything over 3 months).) Inevitably, there are problems with the pipeline. There’s the universal managerial answer to these issues, “You need to get more in the pipeline!” “Well yeah, but…….” Turns out the advice to get more into the pipeline isn’t really […]
Scaling “Authentic Conversations”
I just received one of those emails. I’m on a distribution list, I’ve been invited to hear a webinar on “How do you scale authentic communications.” Among the topics they will be covering are: “how to automate meaningful and timely follow up,” and “how much time is too much time spent on personalizing emails………” (Interestingly, the only personalization in this email was my name. Nothing else was specific to our company or our priorities) Huuughhhh………????? Authenticity at scale?????? In fairness, I’m not going to sign up for this webinar, so I have no idea what this vendor will present. Perhaps […]
Just Because Buying Is “Chaotic,” Doesn’t Mean It’s What Customers Want!
As we increasingly understand the “Chaotic Buying Journey,” as illustrated by the great work done by my friends at Gartner; marketing and sales people are struggling with, “How do we respond?” Too often, the thinking is, “We have to meet the customer where they are at!” Some marketing and sales enablement people are reveling in the new content challenge, thinking, they have to provide content and related support for every one of these points in the buyer journey. The thinking is, “We must mirror the buyer journey.” The underlying principle of aligning with the buyer’s journey and intercepting them where […]
Forecasting Games
We’ve all been there, we’ve played the same games. It’s about the forecast–the monthly, quarterly, annual forecast. We’re pressured to commit. Ultimately, we agree on a commitment, “Lock me in at $10M for the quarter, boss! I guarantee you that I’ll make it.” At the beginning of the quarter, we kinda-sorta see the path. We know “these deals” will come in, we’re hoping we can make these “other deals” happen, and we’re crossing our fingers that good luck and clean living—well good luck and wishful thinking, will somehow help us bridge whatever gap. Then midway through the quarter, we have […]
Forecast Integrity
Recently, I was in a discussion with a great sales management team. At one point in the discussion, we started discussing forecast and accuracy. It’s a difficult topic, too often, I think management spends entirely too much time obsessing over the forecasting process. As we discussed ways to improve forecasting, a key point came up. We can never hope to achieve any level of integrity in our forecasts, until we have integrity in our Target Close Dates. Achieving our target close dates is critical to improving the integrity of our forecasts, yet too often, sales people and managers spend too […]
Who’s Your Competitor, Looking In All The Wrong Places
The email asked me to participate in a market research survey. It was from one of the old line business publications, it promised a donation to one of my favorite charities, so I decided to take it. The survey was pretty exhaustive. It asked me all sorts of questions about my reading preferences. There was one problem, though. As they asked for my preferences, the choices I was given were only their traditional competition–other old line business publications. They never asked me some important questions–if they had, they would have discovered something entirely different and more important. They got my […]