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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
Just Because Buying Is “Chaotic,” Doesn’t Mean It’s What Customers Want!
As we increasingly understand the “Chaotic Buying Journey,” as illustrated by the great work done by my friends at Gartner; marketing and sales people are struggling with, “How do we respond?” Too often, the thinking is, “We have to meet the customer where they are at!” Some marketing and sales enablement people are reveling in the new content challenge, thinking, they have to provide content and related support for every one of these points in the buyer journey. The thinking is, “We must mirror the buyer journey.” The underlying principle of aligning with the buyer’s journey and intercepting them where […]
Forecasting Games
We’ve all been there, we’ve played the same games. It’s about the forecast–the monthly, quarterly, annual forecast. We’re pressured to commit. Ultimately, we agree on a commitment, “Lock me in at $10M for the quarter, boss! I guarantee you that I’ll make it.” At the beginning of the quarter, we kinda-sorta see the path. We know “these deals” will come in, we’re hoping we can make these “other deals” happen, and we’re crossing our fingers that good luck and clean living—well good luck and wishful thinking, will somehow help us bridge whatever gap. Then midway through the quarter, we have […]
Forecast Integrity
Recently, I was in a discussion with a great sales management team. At one point in the discussion, we started discussing forecast and accuracy. It’s a difficult topic, too often, I think management spends entirely too much time obsessing over the forecasting process. As we discussed ways to improve forecasting, a key point came up. We can never hope to achieve any level of integrity in our forecasts, until we have integrity in our Target Close Dates. Achieving our target close dates is critical to improving the integrity of our forecasts, yet too often, sales people and managers spend too […]
Who’s Your Competitor, Looking In All The Wrong Places
The email asked me to participate in a market research survey. It was from one of the old line business publications, it promised a donation to one of my favorite charities, so I decided to take it. The survey was pretty exhaustive. It asked me all sorts of questions about my reading preferences. There was one problem, though. As they asked for my preferences, the choices I was given were only their traditional competition–other old line business publications. They never asked me some important questions–if they had, they would have discovered something entirely different and more important. They got my […]
Help People Even When You Know They Can’t Help You Back
I”m on another 11 hour plane flight, encamped in my “pod,” I have my noise cancelling headphones on to help isolate me from the activities around me. At these moments, with relatively few distractions, I take some time to reflect and be a little more philosophical. I started thinking about the “expectation of reciprocity.” Stated differently, “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” How did I get to pondering this issue? Part of it is the never-ending, mindless chatter/offers I get on platforms like LinkedIn. People reach out, “I saw your profile, you have an interesting background, we have lots […]
What’s Your “Net Promoter Score?”
The “Net Promoter Score,” has been around for a long time. In 2003, Fred Reichheld introduced it in his HBR article: “One Number You Need To Grow” The concept of the NPS is simple, you ask a customer: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague? The answer is usually rated on a 0-10 scale. Promoters are those providing scores of 9-10, Detractors are those providing scores of 0-6. The NPS Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. It’s not unusual for an organization to have […]