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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
FOMU, Seller Style
First, those of you who know me well, know my preferred acronym is FOFU, but FOMU is the Fear Of Messing Up. FOMU, from the customers’ perspectives has been nicely articulated my friends, Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna. I’ve written about Buyer FOMU incessantly, helping buyers make sense of what they face, developing their confidence they are doing the right thing is critical for their success, and, ultimately, ours. But until I attended an event last week, I never thought very deeply about the FOMU we as sellers and leaders experience. On reflection, FOMU is a part of our lives, […]
“Sales Theater”
Or Theatre depending on where you live 😉 Over the past few weeks, I’ve had two experiences in Sales Theater. I’ve struggled in thinking about them, whether they were dark dramas or unintended comedies. Both were choreographed from the same playbook, I’ll describe the second since it was only a couple of days ago. I was at a conference of about 150 CROs, RevOps, RevEnablement leaders. They keynote speaker mounted the stage, following a dramatic video. He was followed by his own cinematographer, I suspect so his performance could go down in history. There were the dramatic pauses, the positioning, […]
“That Guest” At The Get-Together…..
I hate being trite with this analogy, but I will. My post “Cold Calling Was Never ‘Alive’” generated a lot of interesting questions and conversation. They were variations on the same theme, “I need to get to these people to tell them how we can help them….. I need to share our experience in working with customers like them….. I need to schedule a demo of what we do……” Repeating myself: Customers don’t care about it until they do! Yet this is where we always start with our outreach. Let me try to attack this issue with a different analogy. […]
“We Are Human Beings First, …..
One of my favorite musicians is Yo Yo Ma. I was listening to an interview of him, he was reflecting on his mentor, Pablo Casals. Casals was probably the best cellist of his time. Yo Yo Ma quoted Casals, “I think of myself as a human being first, a musician second, a cellist third.” It’s something we must reflect on and constantly remind ourselves of. In the press of everyday business, in our busyness in getting things done. In our focus on scaling, growth, results, too often, we lose the view that we are all human beings first. We target […]
“Rearranging The Deck Chairs”
Yesterday, I was privileged to sit in a discussion with a number of SaaS founders and sales executives. We were talking about organizing the GTM functions to maximize performance. It was a fascinating discussion. It’s also like so many discussions I see, with all sorts of organizations. These discussions focus on how we structure and organize to drive higher levels of performance. Over the years, we’ve seen the development of different organizational models on the GTM side of organizations. There were the traditional silos of sales, marketing, customer service, and others. And within each of those silos were subsilos, for […]
Settling…..
This morning, clearing my inbox and feeds, I noticed a headline. It referred to the average tenure of GTM executives being 17 months….. The article offered sound advice on how to deal with a career living in 17 month increments. My thought, in reading this was, “Why do we settle for this? Why do we consider this acceptable? Wouldn’t we and the organizations we lead achieve much more with longer tenures?” Then I reflected on how much we “settle” for. We rationalize these with all sorts of excuses, “That’s just the way things are…., But we are hitting our numbers…, […]