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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 Forecast Review
We are only a few days into a new quarter, but I’m deep into forecast reviews. We are both discussing performance on last quarter’s forecast and doing the forecast for the current quarter. I was talking to one manager about his forecast. His team typically pursued very large deals. The average deal size was well over $1M, they were typically long cycle (12-18 months). Here’s our conversation, see if you can spot the problems: Manager: “We did pretty well last quarter. At the beginning of the quarter, my forecast showed we would deliver about $20M. We beat that, barely, delivering […]
Process Is The Foundation For Agility/Nimbleness
We want to be flexible, nimble, able to adapt to the circumstances, leap on an opportunity, respond quickly. We abhor process since that constrains our creativity and ability to innovate. Too often, when I talk to leaders and sales people about process, they cite some of the things outlined above as the reason they don’t want process. The reality, is they don’t understand agile, lean, nimbleness. The mistake random reactions/responses for being agile, when they are about the furthest thing from agile and lean possible. In reality everything in agile and lean is based on deep understanding of process. Process […]
Starting Over
Sales is one of the few professions where we get to start over in the New Year. Regardless how we did in the previous year, we are now reset to zero. In reality, the concept of starting over in the New Year is more symbolic. The reality is most of what we are doing is a continuation of things that we have been working on for some months. We have or should have robust pipelines that we have been developing over the past months. We should have deals we are working, moving the customer through their buying cycle. Symbolically, we […]
When Prospecting Isn’t Enough!
It seems universal, we don’t have enough in our pipelines, we have to prospect. We have to find more opportunities. But then our prospecting outreach isn’t producing what we need, so we cast a wider net. Where reaching out to 100 prospects no longer works, we bump it up to 200, then 500, then 1000, then….. To meet this need for more, we cast wider nets, we increase volumes and touches. If one email won’t do, then we do two, then three. The average number of touches to get a response is skyrocketing. Years ago, it was 6, then 10, […]
Provide Coaching Or Feedback?
We live in worlds of ever increasing complexity. Somehow, in our attempts to deal with complexity, we seem to seek simplistic answers (There is a huge difference between simplifying and simplistic) The most recent example I’ve run across ans an article posing the issue as Coaching or Feedback, seeking to show which approach was most effective. The reality is rather than treating these issues as “either/or” we need to address them as “both/and.” Coaching and feedback really go hand in hand. Done independently, each can be helpful–as long as we are providing good coaching and effective/impactful feedback. But taken together […]
Confusing Simplification With Simplistic
Both we, our customers, our markets, our worlds are getting more and more complex. We face rapid change/disruption, overwhelm/overload, risk/uncertainty, turmoil, constantly shifting focus/priorities/agendas. In the face of this, we struggle to respond, whether it’s to fix performance problems, address new opportunities, grow and expand. As leaders and business professionals, we must constantly seek to simplify things. Whether it’s helping our customers better understand and address their own challenges and opportunities, or simplifying how things get done within our own organizations. Constant focus on simplification enables us to achieve our goals, as well as increasing our effectiveness and efficiency. But, […]