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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
Are You ‘Pissed Off’ Enough To Be A Top Performer?
I saw a brilliant video by Tom Peters, Innovation: Angry People Make Change, be sure to watch it. Being pissed off, angry, impatient is an important concept around success–particularly in sales. Now before some of you jump all over me, these concepts represent a double edged sword. We have to harness the positive, or constructive aspects of these characteristics if we are to be successful. The negative, destructive aspects are a sure path to failure. I think so much of what causes us–and our customers to fail to achieve our potential is that we aren’t pissed off. Sure we may be annoyed, hassled, […]
Do You Know How Your Customer Is Measured?
As sales people, we’re used to being measured. We have pipeline metrics, quotas. We may have weekly call or meeting goals. We have prospecting goals, and on and on and on. Metrics are important to knowing how we are doing in achieving our goals. Some of those metrics are critical in evaluating performance or to our compensation plans. Every sales person understands how they are measured and are driven to achieve their goals. Our customers are no different, they have goals for which they are accountable. They have metrics that let them know how they are doing. Do you know how your […]
Before We Can “Teach” Our Customers, We Have To First Learn From Them
Teaching our customers is a cornerstone of Challenger, Insight Selling, and just plain good sales practice. We want to help our customers learn. It’s actually not that new a concept–we’ve always taught our customers something. It used to be about our products, or our solutions, or our companies. Now the context of teaching has changed–really for the better for both customers, sales and marketing. Today, the teaching that customers value is teaching them about their businesses, customers, markets. What could they do better? What could they do differently? What opportunities might they address? How do they better engage their customers, […]
Why I Won’t Respond To Your Email!
I get at least a couple 100 emails a day (not including the SPAM). A lot of them are trying to sell me on something. Most I quickly delete, but some are interesting and intriguing. Some of the interesting emails are offers to explore a collaboration, people interested in getting me to do something for/with them, some outright trying to sell me something–but still interesting. However interesting many are, I won’t respond to them–I don’t delete them, I keep a file of “bad email marketing examples.” Here’s why I won’t respond to those emails. They are addressed, “Hi,” or “Hi […]
Weighted Pipelines And Forecasts
I have to admit, I’ve never been able to figure out the value or meaning of the weighted pipeline and forecast. It’s one of those things that is embedded in every CRM system, it’s one of those things that I see in all sorts of reports, but I have yet to figure out what it means. I suppose the weighted pipeline is supposed to be some sort of indicator of overall pipeline health, but most processes for assessing probability are hugely flawed. Take a look at virtually every CRM system and the default methodology for determining probability. It’s based on where we are in […]
Confusion About Metrics
I recently read an article from someone I respect, “Revenue Is Not A Metric.” To be honest, I was confused–as I read the article, there was some clarification–“revenue is a result….” As I usually do, when I see something that’s a little confusing, I go to the dictionary to see if I may possibly misunderstand the way a term is being used. I went to Wikipedia to read up on performance metrics: “Developing performance metrics usually follows a process of: 1. Establishing critical processes/customer requirements 2. Identifying specific, quantifiable outputs of work 3. Establishing targets against which results can be scored” […]