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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
What Does This Metric Mean To Me?
We measure a lot of stuff in sales. We have all sorts of pipeline metrics, activity metrics, prospecting metrics, account, territory, retention, renewal, mix, margin, and endless other metrics. We have an entire alphabet soup of metrics, including MQL, SQL, ARR, ACV, TCV, NPS, MRR, LTV, CAC, Churn, and XYZ (OK, I made that up—I think). We couldn’t manager our personal or organizational performance, without metrics, though, I’ve observed we tend to have too many metrics, and those that we have, we too often misunderstand. Metrics are really just some sort of alert. They can tell us, we are on […]
Thank You President Trump!
I would be remiss, on election day, if I didn’t provide my heartfelt thanks to President Trump. While, principally, I want to thank him for what he has taught me–and so many in this country, the credit is not just his. It also belongs to the Republican and Democratic leadership in this country, all have contributed to my education. Their behaviors in the past 4 years have contributed to the this valuable lesson–so it’s important to recognize all of them and thank them. The last 4 years have been a wake up call to me. Sadly, I have taken my […]
“All Sales Problems Are Pipeline Problems….”
“All sales problems are pipeline problems, and all pipeline problems are prospecting problems…….” I was having a conversation with a really smart person. He went on to say, “Ultimately, we can track most issues to how we opened the engagement…” My immediate reaction was, “Well, yes, but……..” I think too many managers don’t even look this deeply, but have similar views, the solution to all anemic pipelines is more prospecting. They don’t even look at refining the initial engagement approach in prospecting, they just demand more. But I’m uncomfortable with this, I wish diagnosing sales performance issues could be that […]
How Do Customers Prospect?
Maybe it’s just me, but have you experienced this hugely annoying trend—both in LinkedIn and though email? It’s customers prospecting–looking for solutions to their problems. Every morning, I find my inbox filled with all these annoying emails/InMails. “We are looking to buy electronic components to use in a new consumer product we are developing. Can we take 15 minutes of your time to talk about how you might help us?” “We are expanding our factory capacity and need to add a new assembly line, can we talk about your products as a potential solution?” “Our IT development backlog is overwhelming […]
The 21 Buying Methodologies
Recently, I’ve been somewhat fixated on the concept of methodologies. I wrote Which Sales Methodology and The Next-Gen Sales Methodology. The first article focused on current sales methodologies, I referred to an article discussing 21 Sales Methodologies. In the second, I suggested a Project Management/Problem Solving approach to the next gen sales methodology. I wanted to test some of my thinking about both the current and future methodologies. In doing this, I developed the following premise: “For a selling methodology to be effective, there has to be a buying analogue/counterpart to the methodology” Stated differently, if we are going to […]
A Next Gen Sales Methodology
Recently, I wrote Which Sales Methodology, suggesting the 21 plus sales methodologies may not be sufficient as we look to the future. I’m not sure I’ll present a methodology for the future, but I will suggest design principles for a Next Gen Sales Methodology. The next gen methodology should be focus on helping the customer navigate their buying process more effectively. Most current sales methodologies focus on what we do to the customer. The new methodology must focus on how we work with the customer. Actually, customers already solved this issue, the leverage project management principles. So rather than inventing […]