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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
Prisoners Of Our Own Experience
Jeremy Donovan published some fascinating data in a post on LinkedIn. He stated 5 years ago, the number of touches, per opportunity, for cold outbound was 200-400. Today, he says it is 1000-1400 touches per opportunity. His observation, “Simply Speechless” is, if anything, an understatement. He does offer some clarification, these touches are across all channels, for example email, phone, social, text. He also says this is across many accounts and contacts. What this means is to find a single opportunity, there are 1000-1400 touches across many potential customers. He goes further, saying this data is for SaaS only. As […]
Proving Math Works…..
There are countless data reporting tools available to sellers and managers. Each provides it’s own take on performance dashboards. Many provide deep insights into performance—your pipeline is anemic, your opens are declining, you aren’t hitting your meeting goals, your win rates are declining. Much of this is helpful, but sometimes there is too much data and we are overwhelmed–what do we pay attention to, what do we address first, what change will give us the greatest performance leverage? One of the biggest issues I encounter in speaking with managers is understanding, “What’s causing these to happen?” We have the data, […]
One Size Doesn’t Fit All!
Everywhere, we see insights and advice. Some well intended and sometimes effective, some pure wastes of time. The advice usually starts out with the following: This advice comes from all sorts of sources. It may be something you’ve learned in your company’s sales training/enablement programs. It may be something you see the top performer in your company doing. Or your manager may be telling you what to do. And your LinkedIn and other feeds are filled with all sorts of tricks and techniques, that if you “do it this way,” perhaps paying a fee to see what it is, you […]
We Need To Think About Retention Differently!
We all know customer retention is important. Creating great customer experiences, making sure we deliver on our commitments, keeping them happy are critical. We are all familiar with the “bow tie” chart, showing the importance of not only retaining, but growing and upselling. And most of the strategies seem built around customer retention. But are all of these enough? The problem with most of our retention strategies is we become the status quo! Remember when you were first chasing the deal. The customer wanted to change. Or possibly, we incited them to think differently. But the status quo became unacceptable, […]
“I Can Do It Better Myself!”
One of the biggest mistakes I see sales managers, particularly new managers, make is the view, “I can do it better myself!” It’s easy to understand this. They were probably top performers as sellers. They probably have deep experience and great capability. That’s part of the reason they’ve been moved into a leadership role. Many sales leaders behave as though they have a big “S” painted on their chests. They swoop in, most of the time uninvited, taking over a deal. The rationale is, “We need to win the deal, we need to hit our goals, I can do it […]
“When All You Have Is A Hammer……”
I’ve been reading about comp plans for sellers. They are a huge challenge. A recent report cited: 97%* of leaders think there are challenges with their comp plans. 91% of organizations failed to hit goal, yet only 31% of them felt the quotas were unrealistic. 78% find their comp plans difficult to understand. And only 1% of RevOps and 12% of Finance leaders believe comp plans are aligned with overall company goals. Yet despite all of this, the primary lever managers use to drive performance is comp–and I suspect that’s why we see the data above. I have to confess, […]