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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
Funnel/Pipeline Games
The funnel/pipeline is a fundamental tool for sales professionals and managers. It’s the tool that helps us understand whether we are on target to meeting our goals. I spend a lot of time looking at funnels. I’ve seen all sorts of issues and potential games (inadvertent and purposeful) that are played with pipelines. I thought I’d spend a little time on a few of them. We all know there the funnel provides us a number of key metrics and indicators about the overall health of our business. Let’s look at a few key elements. The first is overall shape in […]
Getting Things Done Through Our People
Sometimes I think managers leaders aren’t as impactful as we can be because we get our jobs wrong. We think our jobs are about developing great strategies, systems, tools, processes, programs. We spend lot of time analyzing reports and data, trying to determine the keys to driving performance. We’re in constant meetings—far too many internal meetings, and consumed by all sorts of activity. These are important aspects of our jobs, well maybe not all the internal meetings and activities. But they’re not how we get things done. We’re accountable for producing results. Our only vehicle for producing results is through […]
“I’ve Never Ever Sold A Computer Or Piece Of Software”
Many of you know that I spent much of my career in IBM, starting as a sales person moving into the management ranks. Over that period of time, I think either the teams I led or I collected billions in revenue from the computers and software we shipped to our customers. In spite of those billions in revenue, I never sold a computer or software system. What I sold was: The ability to cut years and $10’s of millions in development costs in designing a new airplane or car. The ability to reduce waste and scrap in the foundry process […]
Just Good Enough–The Minimum Viable Sales/Marketing Strategy
Anyone familiar with the work of Eric Ries in the Lean Startup or Steve Blank’s books know the concept of the Minimum Viable Product. Their works focus on the need to for rapid experimentation, learning, and improvement in bringing new products to the markets. For years, I’ve been a proponent of “Just Good Enough,” as a sales or marketing strategy. Perhaps in today’s context, Just Good Enough might be called The Minimum Viable Sales/Marketing Strategy. Too often, I think we fail to change and adapt rapidly enough. We’re a business culture of careful planning, risk avoidance, fear of making mistakes, […]
Band Aid Management Or Sales Management Operating System?
The job of the sales leader is to maximize the performance of the organization. It’s the leader’s responsibility to make sense of the various pieces/parts that impact individual and organizational performance. The sales leader has to make sure the organization is working as effectively and efficiently as possible, executing the corporate strategy with the customers. But, we can’t maximize organizational performance unless we have a framework upon which we base our decisions. Yet too often, that’s what happens with too many organizations. We have nothing in which to ground our decisions, no framework, context or structure to guide us. We […]
The LinkedIn “Invitation”
I’m receiving a surprisingly–and disappointing—large number of “unusual” invitations to connect in LinkedIn. Here’s one I’ve had sitting in my Invitation “Inbox” for a couple of days. I’m confused, I don’t know how to handle it, so I’m seeking your help: ” [So and So] has indicated you are a fellow group member of [This Group]· If you are a VP of Sales who understands [this aspect of sales tools] and desires to stay-in-the-game, but stay off the road, this email is for you. Become a reseller of our [sales tools] software and process. Investigate us at [Company Website] and […]