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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
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 involved […]
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. […]
The Secret To Selling Success
After rigorous research and discussion with many expert colleagues, I’ve discovered the universal secret to Selling Success. Before getting into, it’s important to understand the methodology underlying the research. I did a rigorous scan of the literature, mostly the articles and discussions in my feed in LinkedIn. I assessed likes, comments, reposts the articles by the experts produced. Leveraging friends and colleagues who consult, I asked them what they were seeing with sales executives they work with. The responses tended to re-affirm the observations from my literature search. All totaled we have large, diverse sample sizes. Varying types of products/services, […]
Appreciating Appreciation…..
Appreciation is one of those “soft” topics that tough minded business people, focused on the numbers and growth, don’t tend to appreciate. In selling, I suspect too much of the mindset is, “When the going gets tough, the tough build more pipeline…..” Yet appreciation is integral to our success–both within our organizations, with our partners, and our customers. Appreciation has rich dimensions. It is critical in driving employee engagement. Organizations, where people feel they are heard and valued. Where they feel their managers are generally interested in them and their success. Engagement level is directly tied to organizational success and […]