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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 Seduction Of The Pareto Principle
All of us know, often talk about the Pareto Principle. It’s the 80/20 “rule.” an observation we apply to lots of different things. For example, 20% of our sales people produce 80% of the results. Much of the “data” suggests this is conservative, that far few sales people produce a larger percentage of the results. Often, though, I think we misunderstand this. We tend to treat the Pareto Principle as a law of nature of physics, thinking it is what it is. We feel happy, when we beat it by a little, maybe 30% of our people producing 80% of […]
Math Works, Always-How Do We Tilt The Numbers In Our Favor
In sales and marketing, we at least claim to be very numbers oriented. We have metrics around everything: Click-throughs Bounces Open rates Time spent on a page MQL, SQL, SAL Daily/weekly dials Daily/weekly conversations/meetings Demos Pipeline Coverage Win Rates Average Deal/Transaction Value Sales Cycle Time Lifetime Customer Value Renewal Rates ….. I could go on. There seem to be no end to the metrics we can impose on what we do. There’s a great discussion about whether we are measuring the right things–but that’s the topic of another blog post. Metrics and the goals we establish are critical. They give […]
Should Marketing Be Measured On Revenue?
As a disclaimer, I’m a “sales guy,” and may misunderstand marketing. But I often see discussions about marketing needs to be measured on revenue. I think revenue might be a component of a marketing metric, but I wonder as we aren’t focusing too narrowly on a metric. losing sight of the bigger picture. (Much of what I talk about in this post can equally be applied to sales focusing purely on revenue.) Every function in the organization is accountable for developing and executing strategies and plans that are consistent with the overall corporation’s strategies, plans, and priorities. Clearly, revenue and […]
Digital Wastelands
The digital/social landscape looks increasingly bleak. Channel after channel is becoming a vast wasteland of garbage. As Gerhard Gschwandtner suggests, the channels are increasingly being filled with Digital Graffiti. Looking at the landscape broadly: I get 100’s of emails a day, these are the “legitimate” emails. I get added to every list, I’m OK with periodic emails, summaries, from many of the organizations, it’s an easy way to keep up, but somehow, they think there is new news and I should be interested in hearing from them every day, even though 90% of it is meaningless, and if they were […]
Pipeline Coverage Models
Pipeline coverage is something every sales manager talks about, but few really understand it, that is, most of the time I see it mis-applied, so that it is meaningless, or even dangerously misleading. Pipeline coverage refers to the number of qualified opportunities one must have in their qualified pipelines to make their number. Calculating pipeline coverage is easy, we can all do it in our sleep. We simply divide the number and value of the deals we need to make our number, by our win rate. The two numbers that result are the total number of deals and the value […]
Sales VP Tenure Shrunk To 19 Months
I read a fascinating post from Chris Orlob, filled with interesting data on sales performance. The headline is, over the past 7 years, average VP of Sales tenure has shrunk from 26 months (Chris calls that healthy, I think it is unhealthy) to 19 months, which we both agree is tragic. He couples it to another downward trend, % of reps attaining quota is now roughly 50%. There’s other research that shows slightly different data, but every survey I see has over all sales performance declining. We are on this death spiral of continuing bad performance, with no end in […]