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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 Joy Of Selling……
With smaller groups or one on one’s, I frequently talk about “The Joy of Selling….” To some this concept may seem a little too soft and abstract. Some react, “Dave, we’ve got to focus on hitting the numbers, achieving our growth goals! It’s tough work and sellers need to be tough minded!” Increasingly, I don’t encounter many people, at all levels, that are proud of being sellers. It’s become just “a job.” Or increasingly a “struggle.” Too many view customers and prospects as objects we have to overcome or as the objects that stand in the way of our ability […]
The Inefficiency Of Human Interaction
Human interaction is remarkably inefficient. It’s downright sloppy. We come into conversations with our own biases, hopes, dreams, beliefs, values, fears, experiences, points of view, and goals. We engage others, each with their own biases, hopes, dreams, beliefs, values, fears, experiences, points of view, and goals. And each person in a conversation brings these factors into the conversation….. As conversations progress, things change. Perhaps, we come to agreement–for the moment–on some common goals. Perhaps, we come to agreement on potential things we might do together and next steps. But we change our minds, we change our goals, we talk to […]
Buying Is Messy!
Complex B2B change and buying processes are messy—and they are getting messier! It has, always, been messy. For well over a decade, we’ve seen huge amounts of data directly or indirectly demonstrating the impact of the inherent messiness of buying. A few data points: Increasing numbers of change and buying projects fail! Whether it’s data Morten Hansen presents in collaboration, the data presented in The Jolt Effect, we see 60-75% of internal change management/buying projects fail. When we look at the reasons for failure, part of it is the increasing complexity of the process. We’ve seen the number of people […]
Every Business Is A “Recurring Revenue” Business
The rise of SaaS and other subscription based businesses has created a series of discussions around “recurring revenue” and how those business models differ from non SaaS or subscription based revenue models. While, I’m a big fan of Winning By Design’s “bow tie model,” virtually every business has a bow-tie revenue model, with many having a very lopsided bow-tie with the majority of revenue coming after the first sale. Let’s look at the recurring revenue models across a lot of business categories: The first, and probably a recurring revenue model which represents a much more lopsided “bow tie” than SaaS, […]
Do We Really Understand Performance Failure?
My feeds are filled with data and stories of selling failures. “Our people aren’t prospecting enough! They aren’t keeping healthy pipelines/funnels! They aren’t winning enough deals! They aren’t using the tools! They aren’t making quota!” It’s so easy to blame our people for bad sales performance, but are we assigning the responsibility correctly? Is the failure because of them, or are they failing for some other reason? It’s so easy to blame our people. After all, they are doing the work, they are the people directly accountable for producing results, and when they don’t produce them, it’s easy to point […]
The Importance Of Being “Stratical” Or “Tactegic”
Strategic thinking with most sales leaders seems to be focused on, “How are we going to finish the month?” For front line sales managers it seems to be limited to, “Did you hit your prospecting goals for today, what is your plan to do hit it tomorrow?” The intensity of focus on what we are doing to achieve our goals today blinds us to the fact that things are changing at a rate we have never experienced. As a result, we spend too much time playing catch up, unprepared to address the challenges and opportunities for the coming 1-3 years. […]