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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
The Challenged Customer
Our customers (and us) live in worlds characterized by information overload, rapidly changing circumstances, increasing demands, rising management expectations, scarcer resources, increasing scale, disruption, distraction, and complexity. It’s impossible to avoid feeling overwhelmed, unbalanced, and distracted. Getting things done, getting the support and resources to move forward is increasingly difficult. They must coordinate efforts across more people, they must get approvals and engage more people across the organization–sometimes extending outside the organization to partners, suppliers, customers. Increasingly, their days are driven by interruptions, they are always on–responding to emails or on calls 7/24. Risk, uncertainty, shifting priorities are the norm. […]
There Is No “Playbook” For Buying!
Playbooks are big. There are lots of tools and never ending content around playbooks for marketing and sales. Inevitably, these playbooks are intended to guide us through our marketing and sales processes–providing us relevant questions and content to move the customer through their buying process. Every playbook I’ve seen is very linear in its approach–start at the beginning of the customer buying process, then go sequentially Classically, we have always thought of buying as a linear process: Define a problem or opportunity to be addressed, identify needs/, goals, assess alternatives to meeting those needs/goals, make a decision, implement. We map […]
Sales And Sales Management Is Broken
I have to admit being consumed with CSO Insights latest Sales Performance Report. If you haven’t had the opportunity to read it, make sure you take the time to download and study it. It’s filled with fascinating analysis, each chart presents huge opportunities for performance improvement. The chart I keep coming back to is their 2018 SRP Matrix, reproduced below: Usually, as we look at charts like this, we focus on comparing Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 performances, perhaps being somewhat self-congratulatory it we are at a Level 3. There are profound differences between poor performers and top performers […]
“Take Your Eyes Off The Ball”
We all know the importance of focus, of eliminating distractions. I’ve written about it in this blog. Book after book, blog posts all preach the concepts of disciplined focus, minimizing distraction, keeping our eyes on our goals, keeping our eyes on the ball. It’s very important, too few people do this–generally top performers are viciously focused. But sometimes this focus is limiting, we become prisoners of our own experiences. Sometimes, we gain new perspectives, we get new ideas, we consider alternatives we might never have considered when we look at things completely outside what we normally do. Studying an industry […]
Insist On The Highest Standards
Too often, as I work with organizations, teams, and individual, I find people “settling.” By that, I mean, there seems to be some sort of fatalistic attitude or closed mindset that keeps them from doing their very best and seeking the very best from everyone around them. We see it manifested in all sorts of ways: Sales people not taking the time to prepare or research, because they are too busy. Focusing more on what we do, than our customers’ business challenges because it’s too tough to understand what they care about. Pitching, rather than engaging in deep conversations because […]
Does Quota Matter?
There are a lot of posts, some of them very thoughtful, about whether “Quota” is a reasonable measure of sales performance. I have to admit, I’m torn by this issue, but tend to think Quota is an important measure–though not the only measure. If you’d allow me to think out loud. Everyone in an organization is accountable for producing “outcomes” they are responsible for producing. The CEO is held accountable for revenue, profit, growth, and other outcome issues. Product development is held accountable for new product development goals/launches/performance. Manufacturing is held accountable for output, quality, and other measure. Marketing is […]