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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
Understanding The Problem
We get the Discovery process wrong–period, full stop. Most of the time we actually fail to do discovery. Look at your inbox, I suspect 95% of the prospecting mails you have say, “Organizations like yours have this problem–we solve it. Our product has these capabilities…..” They end it by asking to schedule a meeting or demo. These sellers never try to discover the problem, they assume the problem that supports their pitch. When we do try to do discovery, too often it’s “discovery with an agenda.” We ask questions that enable us to immediately switch the conversation to our solution. […]
Leveraging Deal Size And Sales Cycle
I’ve been writing a series looking, ultimately, at pipeline management. I’ve written about Win Rates, Pipeline Integrity. In this post, I’ll cover two more aspects of pipeline management, Average Deal Size and Average Sales Cycle. To understand our qualified pipelines, we have to know our win rates, average deal size, and sales cycle. Before we start analyzing the pipeline we have to make sure we have a high integrity pipeline. Pipelines filled with garbage are meaningless–none of the analysis we provide will be accurate or helpful. Average deal size is pretty simple, it comes from an analysis of your past […]
Coaching Is A Language!
I wish I were smart enough to be the originator of this term, “Coaching is a language…” All credit goes to Aaron Evans for this term. Coaching is not something we do, it’s not a meeting we schedule with the people we are responsible for. It’s not a specific activity, though we tend to treat coaching as this. High impact coaching permeates every conversation we have. Whether it’s some sort of review, water cooler/Starbuck’s conversations, “windshield” time. Coaching is a language we speak, every day, every meeting, every conversation.. Just as we may conduct meetings in many different languages–English, Mandarin, […]
Normal Distributions Aren’t Really Normal…..
Consultants, like me, market researchers, and technology vendors love normal distribution charts. They are a, sometimes, useful way to look at performance or data on large groups and data sets. For example, when we look at very large organizations, let’s say 1000 sales people. Inevitably, we find the data distribution along virtually every aspect of performance looks like a normal distribution chart. A small number of top performers on one side doing top performance, a small number of poor performers doing their thing, and the majority falling somewhere in between. And we draw all sorts of conclusions from these normal […]
They Got It Right, AI Is Artificial!
Yeah, yeah, I’m on my soapbox again, talking about AI. Lest, anyone think I’m not a fan of AI, nothing could be more incorrect. For years, I’ve been studying AI. In 2002, I cofounded a company that offered an AI tool focused on a couple of problem areas–manufacturing process control and prescriptive maintenance. The company was sold to a major software company, and has the tool has been updated and expanded since then, but still focusing on those two specific domains. That experience helped me begin to understand the power and limitations of AI. Our tool, as with more modern […]
Knowing The Answers Isn’t Enough
As sellers a large part of our job is providing answers. Our customers want to know about our products, we provide them endless amounts of features, functions, feeds, and speeds. We do demos, becoming experts at show and tell (I sure could have used those skills in kindergarten). So much of our training focuses on giving us the answers so that we can respond to our customers’ search for answers. Sometimes, we even get to the point of suggesting questions they should be asking, because we already know the answers to those questions. But we are missing something critical to […]