Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
Celestial Navigation And Sales Leadership
When I was a kid, my father taught me how to sail. At first I sailed in racing dinghy’s never far from the shore. In high school, we graduated to cruising boats. While we never intended to do oceanic cruising, but the shoreline was beyond sight, and one of the challenges was knowing where we were and if we were going in the right direction. My dad’s solution to this was to teach me celestial navigation. I learned how to use the tools like sextants, compasses, and plot our course on maps with dividers. I thought all of this was […]
Prompt Engineering For Sellers
Before I get into this article, credit for the idea comes from a conversation with my friend, Jack Malcolm. Thanks for provoking the idea. The term, “prompt engineering,” is relatively new to most of us. While software developers and AI specialists have understood the concept for year, it’s very new for the rest of the world. But as the LLMs have emerged and grown, the concepts of prompt engineering are starting to fill our feeds. We now have lists of AI generated prompts for just about any scenario, “Generate a prospecting email for this…., How do I handle this objection…, […]
On Service And Serving
It’s rare that I deviate from writing about business, selling and leadership. But today is Memorial Day in the US. It struck me as important, perhaps more so than ever before, to pause and reflect on those who have served and are serving in the military, regardless of the country in which they served. I come from a military family. My father served in WWII, Korea and Vietnam, in the Navy and later in the Coast Guard. His brothers served in the Army. My sister served in the Navy, and her husband commanded cruisers and carriers in his career in […]
Filtering Out The Noise…..
Underlying our GTM strategies, we’ve always thought our jobs is to get our customers the information they need. 90% of our focus is giving them information about our products, our companies, ourselves. Some of it is giving them information in the form of insights, helping educate them on issues in their markets/industries, trends, how other leverage our solutions. It turns out, getting information is not the challenge customers are facing. Between what they normally can find through visiting our websites, doing Google Searches, or leveraging LLMs like ChatGPT, our customers are overwhelmed with information. This overwhelm is so, well, overwhelming, […]
Predictable Revenue
A fundamental underpinning of SaaS is the concept of Predictable Revenue. I’ve always been confused about this thinking, “Why is SaaS based revenue any more predictable than any other revenue model?” As I pose that question, I get a lot of pushback, “Dave, you don’t understand. SaaS subscriptions are very predictable, we have an ongoing monthly stream of revenue coming from the subscriptions….” When I reply, “All you are doing is talking about cash flow, not predictability,” people’s eyes roll, they know I’ve gone off the deep end. I then try another approach, “If predictable revenue is a key underpinning […]
“Why I’m So Interested In Selling,” Jim Barnet
Preface: Jim Barnet and I met through LinkedIn. It’s, perhaps, one of those “unusual” LinkedIn relationships. When Jim reached out to connect, he didn’t start prospecting me. In fact he never has. But we leverage our LI relationship to share ideas, explore issues we each see happening in the markets. These are fascinating conversations, I learn so much from them. In reading Jim’s story, there are a few things that strike me. We tend to think of sellers as “individual contributors. But, today’s reality is selling is something we do with others, collaboratively. Certainly, it’s collaborative conversations with our customers. […]