Partners in EXCELLENCE - Making a Difference
Blog
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
“Amping Up” Your Pipeline Reviews
Managers spend an inordinate amount of time in pipeline reviews. Largely, I think this is the result of lack of clarity of what they want to accomplish in pipeline reviews or too great a focus on the numbers and not what produces the numbers. (but these are topics for other articles.) Probably 95% of all pipeline reviews I sit in are wasted efforts. The manager will start reviewing the pipeline, immediately finding a deal that catches her eye, deciding to deep dive into that. Guess what, all of a sudden the pipeline review has become a deal review! The conversation […]
Can Revenue Be Predictable?
I saw an interesting question on LinkedIn, “In SaaS businesses, can revenue still be predictable?” My reaction to this question, not just limited to SaaS, is “Absolutely—-sort of………” Building predictable revenue streams is nothing new to sales. The creation of SaaS companies with a high volume, high velocity model for acquiring customers wasn’t the inception of predictability in revenue generation. For decades, perhaps centuries, organizations have built models to predict revenue, all with varying degrees of accuracy. In some businesses, there are highly predictable revenues based on highly sophisticated trend analysis. These models take into account seasonality, economic conditions, market […]
What’s Going On With Digital Business Transformation?
It seems impossible to escape the articles on Digital Business Transformation. Sales/Marketing Automation Tools suppliers are jumping all over it, because it helps them sell more tools. Pundits focus on how marketing and sales must leverage these tools to engage customers. To some degree, I think much of the discussion is this year’s version of social selling, since that term has fallen into disfavor. More broadly, the articles seem to focus on IT transformations and technologies like AI, Machine Learning, Robotics, IoT, etc. It’s a brave new technology driven world. All of these discussions are important, but I think they […]
What We Get Wrong About Account Based Selling
Account based marketing and selling gets a lot of attention–it should. There’s huge amounts of data about the cost of acquisition–the cost of growing revenue from existing customers versus the costs of acquiring new customers. Before I go further, let me be clear, we have to drive both, if we are to grow over the long term, we need to be acquiring new customers and expanding our share within current customers. But the focus of this article is on our current customers and how we grow the business. But what do we get wrong about growing our accounts? We abandon […]
What’s Next?
A critical question for every sales professional is the question of “What’s next,” particularly as we look at the deals we seek to move forward. Too often, doing deal reviews, sales people share what’s happened, but struggle with the question of “what’s next?” They know they are trying to win a deal, too often, they respond, “Well, I’ve got to get an order.” But when probed, “What are the next things that have to happen to get the order?” The majority of sales people that can answer the question, generally respond, “We have to do a discovery call, we have […]
Automation–Creating Higher Impact Interactions
There’s a lot of discussion, most of it pretty misguided, about the potential impact of automation and AI on sales and buying. Most of the discussions are about customers preferring to buy through electronic channels and moving away from the need for sales people. There will be huge movements to that mode of buying with certain types of buying. Personally, for example, if I can get something through Amazon or other web store, I prefer that. Less out of avoidance of sales people, more out of convenience. But too much of the discussion of the future of selling–particularly complex B2B […]