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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
Banish Farmers And Farming!!
No, I’m not making a political statement about our agricultural sector. Farmers and farming are what brings food to all of us. Possibly one of the most destructive concepts ever introduced into sales is the concept of hunters and farmers. It establishes a go to market strategy that, according to research, doesn’t really work, and absolves sales people of the responsibility for prospecting and constantly looking for new business. Let’s dive in deeper. I’m not sure how the concept of hunters and farmers ever arose, but the notion is hunters go out and find new business. They find new accounts, […]
Your Forecast Is Not About The Numbers!
Let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine you are a VP of Sales. You see tremendous opportunity coming out of the pandemic and in the economic recovery. You want to be prepared to seize that opportunity. You justify hiring and onboarding 100 new sales people over the next two quarters. You need them to be able to execute the strategies to seize the opportunity. You work with your VP of HR to find and hire those 100 sales people. The VP of HR commits, “I’ll get it done!” At the end of the quarter the VP of HR comes to you […]
What Market Narrative Are You Shaping To Help Your Customers?
The pandemic is impacting everyone and everything in profound ways. Few of us have seen this level of disruption in our life times, something that impacts every individual, in every country, and every business and community in the world. Many are reeling with the personal, organizational, and community impacts. Each of us is searching for answers–often the questions are unanswerable, currently. Some may never be answerable, but we have to figure out how to address them. People are trying to make sense with the new dynamic. What does what is happening mean to us as individuals? As organizations? As communities? […]
What’s The Purpose Of A Pipeline Review?
I sit in dozens of pipeline reviews. They all tend to have the same format, someone displays a pipeline chart–sometimes a standard report in the CRM system, too often, an excel extract. The report typically has a list of deals, target close date (usually we are focusing on this month or this quarter), and expected deal value. The deals may be positioned in sales stages, with subtotals for the total value of the deals in each stage, and the total value of the deals in the pipeline. Then each manager reviews the pipeline. Typically, this is where the review goes […]
Acting On Purpose
“Purpose” is a foundational principle for success, yet we pay little attention to it. In times of crisis, purpose and purposefulness is how we navigate risk and uncertainty. Our purpose provides grounding, something that, when challenged, we come back to in trying to figure our path forward. Using Simon Sinek’s popular terminology, our purpose provides us our “Why?” We, sometimes, confuse our purpose with outcomes created in pursuit of our purpose. We, often, have no purpose. For example, “shareholder value” is not a purpose, neither is “making money,” “creating profitable growth.” But having a strong, focused purpose provides us the […]
Who Is Your Customer?
Knowing our customers, focusing on defining who they are, what they are trying to achieve, how we help them is critical to our success. Staying focused on these customers–the one’s we help the most, and with whom we are most successful, our ICP is critical. Yet too often, as we look at our marketing, prospecting, and our pipelines, we attempt to reach everyone that fogs a mirror. If we are challenged to “find more,” rather than focus on where we have the biggest impact–narrowing our search for prospects, we cast a wider net, inflicting meaningless messages on customers we can’t […]