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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
We’ve Built The Scoreboard, But Forgotten The Game.
Somewhere along the way, we replaced the mission, our outcomes, with the metric. What gets our attention are the scoreboards and dashboards, instead of what we are trying to achieve. It’s happened gradually, disguised as data-driven management. We built dashboards. We set targets. We tracked performance. And in that process, we got lost. The metric was never supposed to be the point. It was supposed to tell us whether we were on the path to achieving our goals, executing the mission. Instead, it became the focal point. We forgot about the outcomes and the mission entirely. Watch what managers focus […]
Are We Using the Same Map?
Every seller has a map. It’s called a sales process. It has stages, milestones, and exit criteria. It tells sellers where they are, what they should be doing, and where they’re headed. In theory, it’s a GPS for getting from first conversation to a closed deal. While they have this “map/GPS,” based on their best experience, too often, they ignore it. They know a better way, they know the short-cuts, or “this situation is different. Instead of using the map, they “know better,” navigating by instinct. Sometimes instinct works. More often, it produces a longer, less efficient path. Or the […]
You Can Lead A Seller To Water, But You Can’t Make Them Think!
We’ve built something remarkable in modern sales organizations. Over the past two decades, we’ve constructed an elaborate infrastructure: scripts, playbooks, sequences, talk tracks, battle cards, cadences. We’ve constructed metrics tracking every activity, with performance dashboards providing red/yellow/green signals. We’ve built tech stacks that are the envy of our competitors. These have all been designed, theoretically, to drive consistent, scalable growth. But there’s a problem. In our pursuit of consistency and activity, we have systematically designed thinking out of the profession. And now AI is making that visible. We started with good intentions. Sales leaders looked at their top performers, tried […]
Discovery Isn’t Just For Selling
We’ve spent decades drilling the importance of discovery into every sales methodology. We teach our people that you never lead with a pitch. You never assume you know the customer’s problem. You ask, you listen, you explore. You earn the right to propose a solution by first deeply understanding the situation. And we know that discovery isn’t one-directional. The best discovery conversations are those where the customer is learning too — clarifying their own thinking about the problem, seeing connections they hadn’t seen, developing a sharper understanding of what they actually need. When both sides are collaborating in this process, […]
Do I Care?
Mitch Little read my recent post on competing to lose 80-85% of our deals and responded with something that stopped me: “Your analysis is spot on. You clearly outline how to succeed. Now how do we light that fire?” He went further: “If people do not truly care, but only go through the motions, we will continue to actually deteriorate in outcomes.” My first instinct was to write about how organizations need to create conditions where people care. How leaders need to restructure metrics, coach differently, and focus on quality over volume. But the more I thought about it, I […]
“We Are Competing To Lose 80-85% Of Our Deals!”
Imagine a CRO presenting to the exec or investor team. This CRO is presenting their GTM strategy, and a key statement in that strategy is, “We are competing and hoping to lose 80-85% of the deals we invest in!” We all know what happens. That CRO is sent packing, a new CRO is brought in, a new playbook. Three months later, we see, “We are competing to lose 80-85% of our deals!” This strategy is unspoken. Few would call it a strategy, but it’s pervasive in so many organizations, particularly in the tech sector. The way it’s expressed is, “We […]
