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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
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 […]
What’s Different About Account Based Marketing/Selling?
Account Based Marketing/Selling is all the rage today. if you haven’t jumped on that bandwagon, you clearly aren’t one of the cool kids. But having played in this space for more than a few years, a lot of what I see is deja-vu all over again, echoing concepts from the 80’s, 90’s, even before (look at some of the original books on account based selling and when they were published. There are some differences in ABM/ABS–ironically, very few people talk about them, except some of those grizzled veterans who have lived this through their careers. It seems marketers in ABM […]
On Professionalism
How would you feel if you walked into a dentist’s office, and everyone in the office had terrible/rotting teeth? Would you hire a contractor whose tools are rusted or broken? Or a landscaper whose yard was filled with weeds and dead plants? Would you eat at a restaurant that is filthy and has rat traps in the corners? How we present ourselves is important to building credibility, confidence, and trust with our customers. Yet I’m amazed at the number of sales people (note, I didn’t use the term “professional”) that present themselves poorly. I’m not speaking of how one dresses, […]
“Active Listening” Is Not A Technique
Catching up on my reading, I ran across an article on Active Listening. It was focused on sales people and the author made the statement, “Active listening makes them feel like they are being heard…..” I’m sure that’s not what the author intended to communicate, but it got me thinking about many other things I hear and read about active listening. Active listening–at least true active listening is not a technique. We know some of the things we do in active listening–playing back what the individual is saying, mirroring, probing/questioning. These are all very important and very helpful in understanding. […]