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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
What If We’re Not Important?
It’s difficult to imagine what we sell might be unimportant. It’s important to us, it’s how we make our living. It’s important to our company, it’s why the company exists, it’s why we design and build products and solutions Our solutions are important to our customers—at least some of them–perhaps a certain department, a functional area, certain teams within our customers. It used to be, at least for larger companies, that if we could come up with a business case that was compelling enough, our customers could “find the money.” They’d take the proposal–by that time, it was theirs–something they […]
Performance Management Friday — Abandoned Deals
Last week, I talked about the importance of Win Loss Analysis. No one questions doing win/loss analysis, in particular, we really worry about losses. There is a hidden performance and resource drain that can have a dramatic impact on our success. It’s the abandoned deal. Abandoned deals happen more frequently then we think–we usually don’t track them well. But they’re the deals that we’ve qualified and pursue proactively. We may abandon them for many reasons–we lose interest, our customers lose interest in us, we see that we can’t win, or any other reasons. Increasingly, however, I’m seeing the most damaging […]
What Happens When The Customer Doesn’t Raise His Hand?
There has been an important revolution in marketing thinking over the past years. The move from thinking about campaigns to rich content programs and nurturing is important. It recognizes something important, that customers want to learn, they want to be educated. These programs enable us to develop “relationships” with customers and nurture them up to the point of their deciding they need to take action and start a buying process. In our nurturing programs, we design them to have the customer take different actions through the program that help us gauge their level of interest, their urgency, and their readiness […]
On SOPA And PIPA
I’m taking a bit of a departure from some of the “rules” I have established for myself and this blog. One thing I have avoided is taking political positions, using this blog as a bully pulpit for those types of things—though I use it as a bully pulpit for a lot of other stuff. In this post, I have no intent of taking a political position, but there are some important pieces of legislation that impact virtually every business and organization for which the Web is a part of their strategies. I think it’s important for people to understand these […]
I Thought I Had Solved World Hunger
Not long ago, my wife had to be away from home for a week. It happened to be a week that I wasn’t traveling so, I had to fend for myself on meals. The first day, I struggled with what to do. The easy answer was to go to a restaurant. But I spend too much time on the road in restaurants. I considered take out, but that seemed to be a variation on the same theme. Then I discovered something amazing—and it was less than a half mile from our house. It was this thing called a grocery store. […]
Pay For Performance
Over the past few months, I’ve been involved in a lot of discussions on sales compensation. Last quarter, the conversations focused on commission and bonus plans people were looking to put in place for this year. Last week and this week, I’m involved in a lot of discussions about people being disappointed in the bonuses they received or didn’t receive for last year, how to manage the issues and so forth. We talk about pay for performance all the time. Everyone likes pay for performance when there are great years. When we’ve blown out the numbers or overachieved our goals, […]