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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
Before We Can “Teach” Our Customers, We Have To First Learn From Them
Teaching our customers is a cornerstone of Challenger, Insight Selling, and just plain good sales practice. We want to help our customers learn. It’s actually not that new a concept–we’ve always taught our customers something. It used to be about our products, or our solutions, or our companies. Now the context of teaching has changed–really for the better for both customers, sales and marketing. Today, the teaching that customers value is teaching them about their businesses, customers, markets. What could they do better? What could they do differently? What opportunities might they address? How do they better engage their customers, […]
Why I Won’t Respond To Your Email!
I get at least a couple 100 emails a day (not including the SPAM). A lot of them are trying to sell me on something. Most I quickly delete, but some are interesting and intriguing. Some of the interesting emails are offers to explore a collaboration, people interested in getting me to do something for/with them, some outright trying to sell me something–but still interesting. However interesting many are, I won’t respond to them–I don’t delete them, I keep a file of “bad email marketing examples.” Here’s why I won’t respond to those emails. They are addressed, “Hi,” or “Hi […]
Weighted Pipelines And Forecasts
I have to admit, I’ve never been able to figure out the value or meaning of the weighted pipeline and forecast. It’s one of those things that is embedded in every CRM system, it’s one of those things that I see in all sorts of reports, but I have yet to figure out what it means. I suppose the weighted pipeline is supposed to be some sort of indicator of overall pipeline health, but most processes for assessing probability are hugely flawed. Take a look at virtually every CRM system and the default methodology for determining probability. It’s based on where we are in […]
Confusion About Metrics
I recently read an article from someone I respect, “Revenue Is Not A Metric.” To be honest, I was confused–as I read the article, there was some clarification–“revenue is a result….” As I usually do, when I see something that’s a little confusing, I go to the dictionary to see if I may possibly misunderstand the way a term is being used. I went to Wikipedia to read up on performance metrics: “Developing performance metrics usually follows a process of: 1. Establishing critical processes/customer requirements 2. Identifying specific, quantifiable outputs of work 3. Establishing targets against which results can be scored” […]
Dealing With Ambiguity
Things are so much easier when they are black or white, when there is a “right answer” to every question or issue we face. Unfortunately, in the real world of buying and selling, there are no right answers, there is no clear direction–either for us in selling or for our customers. One of the most important skills of high performing sales people is the ability to deal with ambiguity–both in how they work and in engaging customers, facilitating their buying process. I get calls and emails every day; I sit in meetings where people are looking for help and direction, […]
Don’t Get Distracted By The Numbers
As sales professionals, we’re obsessed with the “numbers.” Where are we year to date, what’s the forecast, what’s the pipeline look like, what are the activity levels, how many qualified leads do we have, and on and on and on. We’re constantly measuring, tweaking, analyzing, measuring. We look at numbers from all type of views–increasingly we leverage analytics to give us different perspectives and insights to the numbers. There’s no doubt, numbers are important. But all they are is numbers. The numbers help us identify issues, opportunities and problems. They are yardsticks to measure performance. Numbers don’t solve problems or […]