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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
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 […]
Pipeline Quality
Somewhat surprisingly, my post on Win Rates generated a lot of discussion. As one might expect, much pf that was tied closely to the concept of pipeline quality. Stated differently, any sales person can always hit whatever pipeline goals that are established, for example, my favorite really clueless goal is that you have to have 3X pipeline for it to be healthy (I hope I don’t have to explain why that is clueless.) Give a sales person a pipeline goal and they can always hit it. The problem, is they usually fill it with garbage—which has an adverse impact on […]
Ask–Don’t Guess–Don’t Assume…..
I’m a, sometimes, fan of Scott Osman’s posts. He just published a fascinating article, “Ask Don’t Wonder” He makes the observation: “In too many situations, uncertainty was causes by trying to figure out what was going on rather than just asking the people who knew.” Our inability to do this, creates unnatural tension in ourselves and in those we work with. In our roles as leaders or as sellers, I think we, often, do a variant of this. Instead of asking, we make a guess or we make an assumption. The majority of the time, we are wrong! We’ve guessed […]
Win Rates
As much as we obsess on winning, hitting our goals, earning commissions; we are actually pretty bad at it. Over the years, the data demonstrates how badly we actually do. Fewer sellers achieving quota, more customers choosing not to buy, more customers choosing not to engage sellers. Everything is going in the wrong direction. While companies are achieving their revenue goals, they do so by obsessing on doing more. More sellers, more volume/velocity, extended outreach. But sometimes, when we get below those numbers, we see they are actually underperforming their potential. While they are achieving their revenue goals, they should […]