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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
AI And Sales, What We Misunderstand
Based on much of the press, much of it created by vendors of AI solutions, AI is the answer to all the problems we have with sales and marketing. We are presented a brave new world where we can engage the right customers, say exactly the right words at the right time, making sure we ask no more than 4 discovery questions, that our opening pitch(?) is no longer than 9.1 minutes, that….. All of this, done under the auspices of AI or it’s companion, machine learning (ML) will be the answer to our revenue generation challenges. Sales execs and […]
Sales People/Manager Churn Is Unacceptable!
Over the past several weeks, I’ve been involved in a number of conversations with colleagues and sales execs. Inevitably, we touch on the sad state of affairs on sales talent. The data on churn (voluntary and involuntary) is horrible! Depending on the market data, tenure for managers and sales people is anywhere between 15 and 22 months. We are completely turning our organizations–management and sales people roughly every 3 years! This is craziness! With onboarding (for complex B2B sales) at roughly 10 months, and sales cycles often exceeding 6 months, it’s no wonder that sales performance continues it’s downward plummet. […]
Giving Them The Answers
Let’s conduct a thought experiment. As one might do in experiments, imagine A/B testing. We’ll create an A group and a B group. The people in each group are identical in capabilities, backgrounds, experiences. Both groups are equally skilled and capable. Now we are going to give people a test. It’s around some complex issues. Group A doesn’t have to study or prepare for the test. We’ve decided to given them the answers. Group B has to study and prepare. We train them, we coach them. Some struggle a bit, but they learn. Test day, 100% of the people in […]
“What We Do Is Not Complicated”
There are a few people I follow that always make me think. Andy Paul is one of those. Recently, his newsletter was titled, “What We Do Is Not Complicated.” My knee jerk reaction, was, “Andy, this is one of the few times I really disagree with you!” But because he’s such a smart guy, I thought, maybe I’m not getting something. Some things I thought about: I think we try to over complicate the process of engaging and working with our customers. In some sense, what we do is very simple: We find customers that have the problems we are […]
Great Habits Start With Simple Things
This post is another of my learnings on my personal learning journey on micro improvements. There are two habits I’ve realized are critical to my productivity that are enormously simple, but it’s taken a long time to recognize them. One is hugely simple to implement–it really focuses on my mindset. The other is theoretically easy, but takes a lot of practice to make it real. Let’s start with the easy one. It’s really about establishing routines that get my day started well. I’ve discovered, if I start my day right, things tend to go really well. At the end of […]
Training And The Forgetting Curve
Not long ago, I wrote a post, Sales Training And The “Forgetting Curve.” It’s stimulated more questions and conversation than I anticipated. I’d encourage you to read the article, but the basic idea is that 80% of skills we seek to develop through training are forgotten within about 90 days (Actually the forgetting curve shows a much more aggressive forgetting schedule.) The thing that has surprised me about the conversation, is most of it has centered around, what we are investing in training and how to get the most of the investment out of training. It is a time/cost argument. […]