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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
Templates, Scripts, Context, and Variability
I read a fascinating discussion led by Jeff Molander on the Copy Culture. Much of the discussion revolved around how we look at best practice, finding things to copy or emulate to improve the ability for others to achieve higher levels of performance. We develop scripts and templates, that help us leverage those practices and experiences that have worked, minimizing those that don’t work. We can gain great performance advantage by systematizing that which has been very effective, and consistently executing those best practices in a disciplined manner. The templates, scripts, methodologies, processes are all tools we leverage to do […]
What’s Next? How Are You Moving This Forward?
I have to apologize to Dave (not me). Dave’s a good sales person, we were doing a deal review on a hugely important opportunity for his company. He’s been working the deal pretty well, it’s very complex with several people from his company supporting him, a partner and at least the 11.7 buyers we are told are involved in complex B2B buying. He’s doing a good job, but I was getting impatient. When we started the review, he talked about what had been happening and where he and the team were with the deal. I asked, “What does the customer […]
On Thanks-Giving
2020 has been a year that none of us have ever experienced. We have found our lives and those around us turned upside down. The pandemic, the economic downturn, social and political unrest–worldwide. No one has escaped these. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t know someone impacted by Covid 19, or known someone who has been hospitalized or died. Likewise, we have seen friends, family, people and businesses in our community who are struggling to make ends meet. In the face of all of this and on the eve of the American “Thanksgiving,” many are wondering what there is to […]
Action Plans, The Well Structured “To-Do”
My life seems to be spent in one meeting after another. Reviews of all types, planning sessions, problem solving sessions, training—you name it, I go from meeting to meeting. In most of those meetings, we are trying to address some issue–how to win a deal, how to address performance issues, how to address organizational/structural issues, how to address new opportunities or problems. In each of these meetings, there are the the follow ups, action plans, next steps, or to-dos. These are critical, they enable us to make progress in achieving our goals and objectives. But our action plans lose a […]
Looking For What Isn’t Being Done Or Said
Just today, alone, I’ve been in several meetings. A couple were deal reviews, one was a major strategy/restructuring discussion. I learned more in these sessions by what they didn’t say and present than by what they did say. Listening/observing what isn’t being said or done is as important to understanding what is being done. Whether it is working with a customer moving them through their buying cycle; working with your people in deal, account, or other reviews; or major strategy/business planning sessions. When we focus only on what’s being said, we are focused on what people know and how they […]
Chaos, Complexity, Predictable Revenue, Making “Big Moves”
For the past decade, so many have sought to mechanize selling, creating predictable revenue. We developed methods and approaches, we’ve transactionalized the selling process, in spite of too many customers finding increased difficulty in navigating their buying processes. Even before the pandemic and collapse of the economy, how we sold became increasingly unpredictable. The percent of people making their goals continued to decline, organizations churned more rapidly, with tenure declining to 16.5 months. Sales leaders, increasingly, struggled to make sense of changes in their markets and to discover changes in the way the organized and executed their selling processes. At […]