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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
The Death Of Sales Management
It must seem strange to see the author of The Sales Manager Survival Guide writing about the death of sales management. Clearly, something is off. Even worse, I’m cheering this on! Before you burn your copies of the book or take any other rash actions, let me explain myself. The job of the sales manager has devolved over the past ten years. It’s now become largely an administrative and reporting function. It’s also taken on a super seller function, with managers injecting themselves into deals to negotiate and go for the win. How has this come about? Over the past […]
“If It Can’t Be Measured, It Can’t Be Managed!”
I couldn’t believe I was hearing this again. Perhaps for the 100 thousandth time. I had been sitting in a meeting with a pretty powerful team. The CFO had invited himself to the meeting to start understanding things and “getting things straight.” As he talked about what his concerns, he paused for a moment. Then those words came out of his mouth, “If it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed!” You can guess where the rest of the conversation devolved to. I hear it so often, whether delivered by a CFO, CEO, CRO, Rev-Ops, CMO, or a Sales Manager. […]
A New Game Show, “Seller’s Jeopardy”
I was at a party recently, for some reason people started talking about TV Game Shows. They started talking about Jeopardy, particularly the Alex Trebek days. I’ve never been a big game show person, to tell you how off target I was, as they were talking about Alex’s hosting, I kept thinking, “Well what about Vanna White, she was a big part of the show?” As the conversation went on, my mind went to strange places. I started imagining the game of “Seller’s Jeopardy.” Perhaps a competition customers could conduct. Instead of answers, the board would reveal questions. Questions would […]
What Do Chefs And Great Food Have To Do With B2B?
I used to think fine dining meant which dipping sauce I chose for my French fries. Then I met my wife. Kookie had an amazing palate and talent with food. First, she introduced me to NYC restaurants like Le Bernardin, Lutèce, Le Cirque, and later, Chez Panisse in Berkeley. She had gotten to know many of the Chefs, so often, we’d get the last table of the evening, then spend time drinking and talking food with the Chefs. To me, it was a foreign language. Later, she left a great career in technology sales/leadership and enrolled in the CIA (Culinary […]
AI Puts Us At The Edge Of A Chasm…..
AI is better than your SDRs. That’s true. And it’s beside the point. A writer I follow published a piece this week that I’ve now read three times. Not because it’s wrong, because it’s honest, and because it stops one sentence short of what really matters. He describes watching an AI agent book fourteen qualified meetings in a single week. It found the leads, researched them, wrote the personalized emails, handled the objections, and scheduled the calls. No human touched the process. The cost was $2,400 a month against roughly $6,000 for a human doing the same work, plus weeks […]
You Lost On Price, ” But That Explains Nothing!
As part of my client work, I often immerse myself in data. In looking at the win-loss reports, I’m always driven to look at the “loss reasons.” You know that field, it’s the convenient drop down in your CRM and you can select one of several alternatives. While there are usually CRM fields that allow more of an explanation, those are almost always blank. In doing the analysis, 99% of the time, the reason for the loss is “Price!” Very rarely, do I see “Product fit,” or “We screwed up.” Though I’ve never seen that latter option in any of […]
