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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
“Even Though I Hate Talking About Price……”
Someone has been prospecting me, trying to provoke me to respond and take a call. In reality, if he spent two minutes looking at our company and doing a little research, he would realize we are a terrible prospect for what he is selling. But he hasn’t done that, and continues to blindly send emails to me, provoking a conversation. The first two emails were product pitches. In the first email, he wanted to invite my whole team to a virtual lunch, giving us a demo about his product. Then he went on to talk about his product, without even […]
Committed To Stupidity
Sadly, every day I see more sales people committed to stupidity. It’s not making mistakes, misunderstanding situations, even some errors in judgement. As bad as those may be, it’s the commitment to being stupid that astounds me. Stupidity is a choice, and I’m stunned by the number of people that are committed to stupidity. Daily, I get invitations in LinkedIn, “Dave, I’ve looked at your profile….” Yet they never have looked at my profile. Jack Malcolm shared an invitation he received, “Jack, I see in your profile you run and accounting firm. We work with firms like yours….” There is […]
It’s Not About The Metrics! It’s What You Do About Them!
We seem to be metric crazy. Every organization I meet has a whole alphabet soup of metrics. Terms like ACV, MRR, ARR, TCV, LTV, CAC, Churn, Retention, Bookings, Revenue, Quota Attainment, SQL, MQL, Conversions, ATV, Win Rates, Velocity, Customer Growth, Product Growth, Share, Onboarding Time, % of people at quota, Voluntary/Involuntary Attrition, CRM Utilization, Pipeline Loading, Account Planning, Dials, Appointments, Proposals, Customer Meetings, Demos, Time spent per call, Number of questions per call, Types of questions per call, on and on and on. Vanity metrics like number of cups of coffee a day and time spent in the bathroom per […]
Being Mentored And Mentoring
Mentoring takes all forms, some of the more unusual are the most helpful, particularly in my experience. Through my own career, I have had a number of “formal mentors.” Early in my career, in addition to great managers who coached my day to day performance, I was assigned to very senior executives in my company. We would have formal discussions, monthly, and every once in a while they would invite me to participate (most often as a fly on the wall) in key meetings they conducted. These experiences helped me learn and helped me gain broader perspectives about business. They […]
Sales Managers “Closing Business”
I was struggling to meet with a sales manager. He really wanted to talk, we had critical issues he had asked for help in addressing. He kept postponing our calls, “Dave, I’m running all out, I’ve really got to be out in the field closing business for my people…..” We finally had our meeting. I started the meeting asking, “Bill, how’d all those deals go, did you close them…..” Bill went on and on, using a lot of our meeting time, talking about the meetings and his finesse in closing deal after deal. Of course there were a few that […]
Expecting Our People To Think For Themselves
I’ve not been following my normal cadence of blog posts the past couple of weeks. Normally I publish 4-5 a week, in the past two weeks, I published about a third that number. Part of the reason is I’ve been consumed with doing my “day job,” which is helping clients drive higher levels of sales performance than they have ever experienced. But normally, that doesn’t divert me from writing, it actually gives me ideas for posts. But the past couple of weeks, I’ve been in a bit of a dark place on the “state of selling.” I’ve been obsessing with […]