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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
Lean Sales And Marketing, The Cornerstone To Accelerating Revenue Growth
So much of the writing about lean focuses on waste reduction. That’s great stuff, we want to make sure we aren’t doing unnecessary work or producing waste. But, at least for marketing and sales professionals, that’s not the real reason to start your lean journey. (I know I have some lean professionals groaning, but hang in there). The real reason we want to focus on lean principles is they are the cornerstone to accelerating revenue growth—and isn’t that what we’re really about? Lean drives great focus and clarity on “Who is our customer,” and “What do they value?” Viciously focusing […]
Tools Don’t Change People
My friend Bob Thompson made this comment on Customerthink. It’s important, tools don’t change people, they may improve our efficiency, they may help improve our impact, they amplify our capabilities, they extend our reach, but they don’t change people. If we are doing the wrong thing, tools enable us to make mistakes at the speed of light, impacting thousands of people. Anyone who has been around IT and technology for any time knows the tried and true phrase, Garbage In, Garbage Out. But too often we get it wrong, “CRM [Substitute your favorite Sales/Marketing X.0 tool] makes us better sales […]
The Weaponization Of Social Media
I just read Chris Brogan’s piece, The Bare Truth About Social Media, a phrase leaped out at me==how we are “weaponizing” social media. It seems we are at war and social media tools are becoming weapons of mass distraction. Corporations, small businesses, individuals are in ever escalating races for share or the social media space grab. How do we accumulate followers, how do we accumulate likes, how can we “buy” Twitter followers to look more popular, how do we increase our Klout or Kred, how many eyeballs can we get? It seems that we have taken all that was bad about the […]
Customer Success And Quota Attainment Are Not In Conflict
In a comment on one of my posts, Andy Rudin reminded me of something we overlook: Customer Success And Quota Attainment Are Not In Conflict. Too often, our behaviors don’t reinforce this, we are so driven for our own personal success and quota attainment, we forget the customer. Or our managers are so focused on the numbers, they drive behaviors focused on our numbers and less on customer success. We know the consequences of these behaviors—customers recognize it and “reward” us for that behavior, often by choosing to do business with someone who cares about their success instead of making the […]
Competing For Mindshare Or Meaningshare
Mindshare is top of mind(so to speak) in most marketing and sales conversations. How do we capture the hearts, minds and imaginations of customers? We want to capture mindshare with consumers. Creativity in commercials, advertising, leveraging social platforms, increasing volume (figuratively and literally) all aimed at getting the attention of the consumer. We want to capture mindshare of corporate buyers. We race to create more content to have more to share with them. We diversify channels of communication, we leverage every tool or technology we can, we increase volume to capture the attention of the business buyer. There is lots […]
Selling Processes And Rube Goldberg
Rube Goldberg was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, sculptor, and author. He was famous for inventing machines that took the most simple tasks and made them insanely complex. Sometimes, when I look at what we do to ourselves in Sales and Marketing, I wonder if we aren’t creating Rube Goldberg machines. Whether a strategy to close a deal, the selling process itself, our commission plans, our go to market programs, the latest cool, sales or marketing program……. Sometimes, it seems we take what should be so simple–finding customers who have problems we can solve and helping them solve them and […]