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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
Selling And The “Peripheral Players…”
For those of you who haven’t discovered the wisdom and insight of Tom Morris, stop reading now, go to Amazon, order any or all of his books. You will find so much wisdom that help you think about your, your teams, your customers’ success. Follow him on LinkedIn, you will learn so much! With that as an introduction, Tom wrote a fascinating piece on philosophers of the 21st century. Tom thinks limo/taxi/Uber/Lyft drives are among the best, because of what they see every day. I added to the discussion with a perspective on barbers and housekeepers. Tom’s observations got me […]
Flexible Persistence
Reading an outstanding article by Reid Hoffman, False Choices, one term leaped out to me—flexible persistence. It’s such an important and powerful concept. As sellers and managers we get, possibly to a fault, the concept of persistence. We know that success is based on constant and consistent execution of our strategies. We know we will face challenges and resistance–from our people and customers, but that we can’t give up. We know we won’t succeed by doing things randomly, but we must have a structured disciplined approach, that we execute every day, every week, every quarter. We develop our go to […]
The Coming Recession….
I’m starting to get “those” calls. Execs are asking for advice. They are expecting difficult times, they are trying to figure out how to deal with the uncertainty in the economy that all of us face. We’re already seeing the early signs of it. Layoffs, before unimaginable, are happening and more are preparing for reductions. Where a few months ago we were scrambling for talent, comp was skyrocketing to attract the right people; now we are seeing job offers being withdrawn. Execs are also asking, “How do we maintain sales, how do we keep driving revenue as much as possible? […]
“In Working With Other Customers Like You…..”
Our customers are hungry to learn. They (and we) benchmark themselves against their competition and others. They compare what they do with what others do, finding opportunities to change and improve. I’m fond of saying, “we are prisoners of our own experience….” We tend to act based on what we’ve done in the past, often blind to the fact that things have changed, or there may be better/different approaches that may be more effective. One of the greatest things sellers can do is help customers learn what other are doing. We’ve learned the power of “In working with other customers […]
A Different Perspective On Revenue Enablement….
Revenue Enablement is a hot topic these days. I have to confess, it confuses me. I mean, hasn’t revenue enablement–that is maximizing our ability to create and grow revenue, been key for our organizations forever (We might, also, consider Profit Enablement)? Isn’t the responsibility of every customer facing function to figure ways to grow revenue and profits. Whether it’s acquiring new customers, retaining and growing them, doing the things that enable us to profitably grow revenue has always been part of our job. So I’m confused about why Revenue Enablement is such a new thing. So I studied it a […]
Predictable Revenue And Wild Assed Guessing
Predictable Revenue, a concept popularized by Aaron Ross in the first edition of Predictable Revenue (2011), is important. It’s important to us, perhaps to forecast commission earnings and when we might buy that new car or go on the big vacation. It’s important to our managers to know whether we are going to make our revenue commitments in the organization. It’s important to other functions in the company, so they know what products to build and ship, or how to have the right services resources deployed. It’s important to our shareholders because it impacts our share price and company valuation. […]