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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
Send In The “Bots”
AI, “Bots” and related technologies can do a lot to help improve our effectiveness and efficiency. The technology enables us to unload mundane tasks, both making us more effective and efficient. And, of course, there are those that enable the users to do terrible things. We hear reports, almost daily, of concerted efforts to exploit social and other networks with these bots. Recently, I’ve become a victim of the outreach of a company that provides this technology. My “mistake” was belonging to LinkedIn. On a daily basis, I’ve been getting LinkedIn Invitations from different “people.” All have the same text, […]
“1250 Dials, 50 Conversations, 2 Meetings…..”
I was intrigued watching a LinkedIn video from a prospecting expert. He touted his great results, showed videos of him making prospecting calls. I suppose it was to promote his expertise in prospecting. He was leveraging all the best predictive dialing and software technologies, exploiting his glibness/provocativeness on those conversations he had. His numbers, roughly 1250 dials, roughly 50 conversations, roughly 2 meetings. This was typical of his daily 8 hours of prospecting, a result which he was, apparently, very proud of. Regular followers know I’m a “numbers person.” I focus on how we tilt the numbers in our favor, […]
My $500K SDRs
The SDR role is a critical role for many, if not most, organizations. SDRs have the responsibility of generating high quality, hopefully, highly qualified pipeline. When the SDR finds an opportunity, it is usually passed to a sales person to manage through closure. It’s an important job, not just because these people generate a lot of new opportunities, but because they are, often, the very first human contacts our prospects have with us. It’s critical to create a great impression from the very first conversation. We want, in these first calls, to engage the prospect in a credible, high impact […]
What Pisses Me Off About Gartner’s “Spaghetti Chart”
My friends at Gartner published a really important chart a couple of years ago. It looked at the real buying journey and the difficulty customers have in buying. In some circles, it’s become known as the “spaghetti chart.” (Actually it gives spaghetti a bad rap). For those of you that don’t know about it, it’s pictured below. The Gartner research shows, vividly, that the customer buying journey is not linear. They don’t move in a disciplined fashion from problem identification to solution exploration to requirements building to supplier selection. Instead the wander, start and stop, change their minds, go backwards, […]
Leadership Is Not About “Monitoring”
Too often when I speak to sales managers, they focus on “monitoring” their sales people. They constantly focus on: Where they are on MTD, QTD, YTD numbers? Do their pipelines have the right volume/velocity of opportunities? Are the sales people hitting their goals on prospecting calls, customer meetings, and so forth? Are they keeping CRM and other systems updated? …….and on and on. When they see someone not hitting those goals or not “complying” with the standards, they take corrective action, which usually is manifested by: You aren’t hitting your numbers, you need to get going! You need more deals […]
“I won’t pay more than $X!”
We were doing a deal review. It was a big deal with a prestigious customer. Procurement was involved. As we discussed the deal, the sales person said: “Procurement thinks this is a good solution, but they aren’t willing to pay more than $X and we are a whole lot more at Y.” “Have you presented the business case to the procurement folks?” I asked. “We’ve talked about how much this improves productivity and reduces costs, we’ve provided some industry data….” replied the sales person. “But have you provided a specific business case to them?” I asked. “No, they’re stuck on […]