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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 Erosion Of Our Expectations…..
Long time followers know I spend a lot of time advising telcom companies around the world–equipment manufacturers, service providers, others. When I first started working closely with them in the 90’s. quality of service was one of the most critical issues for each one. What attracted and retained customers was the quality of each voice call–the clarity and accuracy of the voices, time lags, stability of the connection, static, all sorts of thins. For data, there were similar concerns about quality of service. When I started working with them, I wondered about this obsession, thinking, “Is it really that important?” […]
What If We Assumed Indecision/Uncertainty Is Pervasive?
Ted McKenna blew me away in a conversation today. He posed the question, “What if indecision is always there?” It got my mind spinning. We’ve not paid much attention to indecision, and I’ll add uncertainty. Too often we, me included, have tended to be “just the facts” oriented. We help people identify what they are trying to do, we help them understand they issues that impact them, how they might look at them. We help them identify the opportunity cost for not taking action to address their potential fear of change. We help them navigate the buying process, ultimately to […]
The Problem With Sales Math, A Thought Experiment
The answer to every seller’s dream is more volume. “If we only had more leads, we could have more top of funnel, which produces more opportunities, …….” We have the algorithms that help us identify what we need to achieve our goals. Simplistically, “X top of funnel produces Y revenue.” For whatever revenue goal we have, we calculate the top of funnel required to achieve that goal. If we want to double our revenue, we have to double top of funnel. If we want to quadruple revenue, we quadruple top of funnel. Math works! From this basic equation, we know […]
The “Problem Focused” ICP
“We” tend to be very sloppy in our definition and focus on our Ideal Customer Profile. Yet it is probably the single most important thing to producing results. We tend to define the functions that may be the purchasers/users of our solutions. “We sell IT solutions to CIOs and their teams.” “We sell sales/marketing solutions, to CROs and their teams.” “We sell financial solutions to CFOs and their teams.” But every IT exec, CRO, CFO probably don’t fit our ICPs. We may refine it to, “We sell solutions to CFOs in financial services companies.” But that’s a big space, it […]
Maybe We Have Things “Inside/Out….”
I’ve been engaged in a number of diverse conversations about our GTM strategies and the challenges so many organizations face in achieving their goals. The conversations have ranged from our overall approach to engaging customers based on lean manufacturing models, to the future of SDRs, to how do we improve win rates/deal strategies, to account growth. Other than the deep frustration people have in the issue of “What used to work is no longer working,” or “Everything is broken,” there has been a common thread through all these conversations. The thinking has been an “Inside/Out” approach. What does this mean? […]
How Manufacturing Works, Applying It To Selling
For some reason, there’s a huge attraction to applying “manufacturing techniques” to selling. I suspect it’s the perceived orderliness to manufacturing processes and the predictability of the outcome. It’s easy to understand that attraction. The lean approaches applied to manufacturing create a hyper efficient process. Second, it always produces the same outcome (manufacturing experts will quibble, but we do design manufacturing lines to produce zero defects.) While most lean manufacturing is a “pull” process, we know that whatever we feed into the beginning of that manufacturing line will produce a very precise outcome/output. Experienced manufacturing people, please forgive me, I’ll […]