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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
When Verbs Turn To Nouns
John Dougan posted something interesting on LinkedIn (There is so little interesting in LI that I treasure the moments when I find something.). It was his struggle with the word Enablement and the concept of what Sales Enablement has become. And John runs sales enablement at a great organization. It got me thinking about something I see happening too much in everything we do in our GTM and customer entanglement strategies. Here’s the basic premise: “What happens when our “verbs” become “nouns,” What happens when we move from “actions” to “structures?” Let’s use the verb “enabling” as an example. When […]
Close But No Cigar…..
According to ChatGPT, the term, “Close but no cigar,” originated in the 1920s-30s. Apparently at carnivals and fairs, cigars were given out as prizes for things like shooting galleries, ring toss, dart games and so forth. When someone missed the mark, the carnie would yell, “Close but no cigar.” We’ve seen the term used for some harrowing moments. In 1999, the NASA Mars Climate Orbiter disintegrated in Mars atmosphere. $327 M down the tubes. Turned out one team was using imperial units in their calculations for the design, the other was using metric units—close but no cigar. In 2012, there […]
Discovery, A Product Pitch In Disguise!
Great discovery is foundational to understanding our customers and their needs. Too often, we skip it, instead rushing to pitch our products. When we do some nominal level of discovery, it’s actually a product pitch in disguise. Our questions aren’t oriented to understanding their needs or what they seek to change. Instead they steer the customer to express their needs in terms of the capabilities/features of our products. We ask, “Do you need this capability….. How do you manage this process…. Would it help if…… Do you need real-time dashboards….. Do you need seamless integration with….?” Our questions go through […]
How Customer Centricity Gets Lost In Our Metrics
As revenue operators, our job is to find and close customers. Whether it’s net new customers, retention/renewal, expansion. We measure our success based on hitting our revenue and profitability goals. Even when we claim to be customer centric, too often, we organize our GTM motions and measure our success in ways that make customers collateral damage, or worse, a means to our ends. We don’t start with the customer buying journey. We don’t start by helping them understanding and defining their problems. We cast everything in our terms and contexts. We organize the customer engagement strategy around our GTM process, […]
“Time To Customer Acumen…..”
Preface: This is long and very nerdy. But I think it’s important to share the details of this fascinating research project. We struggle with the idea of, “How do we develop better business acumen with our sellers? How much time, how much investment, when will we see the results? What this project shows is “Time to customer acumen is amazingly short–and simple!” Enjoy! Yeah, you know I’m a broken record on customer, problem, business, and financial acumen. I bore you with ideas and data showing how developing and implementing these skills is critical in driving our customer relationships and trust. […]
“Solve For” Vs. “Solve With,” The Real Role Of A Seller
Theoretically, we have solutions to our customers’ problems. Unfortunately, we tend not to focus on these, we tend to pitch the solutions, without knowing if the customer has the problem we solve, or really understanding that problem and what it means to them. We train our people to “solve the problem.” In their best engagements, we show up with insights, demonstrating, “here’s the solution to your problem, and if you buy by the end of the quarter we will offer you a discount….” The thinking underlying this approach is “We solve the problem for our customers!” The reality of the […]