Dave Brock, Author at TalentCulture

You Get What You Measure/Compensate For!

It’s an age-old adage, “You get what you measure and compensate for.” If it were true, why do we have such a gap in sales quota performance? We’re measuring it, we’re tracking it, but most sales people aren’t achieving their goals. There are a lot of things that impact quota performance, but I suspect a large part of the challenge is the other things we measure, hold people accountable for, and even compensate at some level. Too often these are activity metrics which desk bound managers track, beating the crap out of those who don’t achieve them. What we measure is

What About Sales Person Retention?

Retention is a hot topic–customer retention that is. We’ve all seen data around customer acquisition costs. Basically, the cost of acquiring new customers is several time higher than the cost of retaining and growing existing customers. The whole subscription model, on which all SaaS and XaaS companies are built has customer retention as a fundamental to the success of the business model. All the discussion around ABM/ABS/ABE is focused on retaining and growing our most important accounts. Makes sense! But how come we don’t see similar focus on Sales Person Retention? A recent study from Glassdoor, shows on average, an employee

Complacency

I struggled with the title of this post, wanting something more eye catching, provocative, perhaps a little less negative. Complacency is an ugly word. No one likes to be accused of being complacent. Complacency is sometimes associated with laziness, though some of the most complacent organizations I encounter are far from “lazy,” but “crazy-busy” with activity. Reflecting for a few moments, I don’t think any individual or company sets out to be complacent. Instead, we are seduced into complacency. Ironically, the greatest seductress for complacency is success! When we are successful, we want to keep going. We keep doing what caused us

Automation: Are We Empowering Human Interaction Or Displacing It?

The sales and marketing technology along with the social networking/selling technologies represent a huge amount of the changes that are driving sales and marketing. They relieve us of many of the tasks that used to take lots of time, enabling us to focus that time on engaging customers and colleagues. They help us in better understanding our customers, markets, and what’s happening, so that we can engage customers with more relevant insights on more timely bases. They enable us to extend our reach, beyond our local geographies to the global community. They help us create greater value for our customers, our

Account Based Everything Applies To Everything!

Account Based Marketing (ABM), Account Based Selling (ABS), and Account Based Everything (ABE) are hot topics these days, particularly in the As-A-Service worlds. There are articles, books, conferences focused on these topics. Observing the interest around these topics, one begins to think, “They seem to have discovered the hidden secret to sales and marketing success.” In some ways, perhaps they have, but in reality, all of this is based on the same basic principles of all sales and marketing success. ABM/ABS/ABE principles are pretty simple: Identify your target accounts. Study and understand them. Understand their business, their customers, markets, competitors, business

Is Job Hopping Inevitable?

As long time readers know, I tend to be pretty opinionated. Recently, I’ve gotten sucked into a conversation thread on LinkedIn about job hopping. It’s semi interesting–much of it is people rationalizing why they move from job to job to job. Much of the job hopping phenomenon has been attributed, incorrectly I think, to millennial. “That’s the way they are, we just have to accept it.” First, job hopping isn’t primarily limited to millennials, I see people in every age group doing it. Second, I think it’s unacceptable to resign ourselves to thinking of this as the future of the workplace.

Busyness Is Not Productiveness

Somehow a packed calendar/agenda seems to be an indicator of our “success.” We live in a 7/24 world, we have more work than we can manage, and we constantly fill our calendars with activities. It impacts people at all levels. I’ve told this story before, but it bears telling again. About 15 years ago, I was working with a Fortune 100 organization. It was struggling terribly to produce results and grow in a very turbulent market. As I met with people, I notices how busy they were, their calendars were filled from the morning to evening with meetings, many had multiple

Turning The Volume Up Won’t Get You More Attention

Recently, I was asked to comment on the impact of attention scarcity in modern marketing. It was for an eBook on The Attention Economy sponsored by the people at LookbookHQ. The eBook is really outstanding, with some very interesting views from a wide range of sales and marketing leaders. I encourage you to take a look at it. As a sample, I thought I’d provide the text of my piece in the article. It follows below: Some years ago, I was in Nairobi on business. In the morning, as I walked out of my hotel, I was surrounded by dozens of children (and some that

Leadership Is About Personal Responsibility And Action

Forgive me, I’m on a bit of a rant. Those who have followed me for some time know I get off on tangents, sometimes writing these articles to deal with frustration and sort out my own thinking. In this specific article, I also have to recognize, I will probably hurt the feelings of a well-intended follower–but frankly, I don’t really care. I am not targeting that individual. (Doesn’t an opening paragraph of apologies and disclaimers make you really curious?) This morning I got an email from a very well-intended follower. It was titled, “A Word Of Caution.” The text read, “Hi Dave-You might want to

Building Your Personal Brand

There’s a lot written about building Personal Brands. A lot of the discussion about Personal Branding has to do with leveraging Social Channels in building huge networks of followers. While it might be ego gratifying to have a large and wide network and to be well known, I think a lot of the thinking around building your personal brand is misdirected. In building our personal brands, we want to focus on building our reputations, perceptions, and visibility within our target customer and prospects, and influencers in that network. Social networks enable us to do this, if we do it smartly, on

Your People’s Performance Is A Reflection Of Your Performance

It’s impossible to be a top performing manager if your people aren’t performing! Yeah, I know that elicits a “Duuggghhh” response, but I’m not sure many managers have really internalized this. It’s far too easy to blame your people–“They aren’t doing the right things, They’re lazy, They may not be the right people, ……” All that may, in fact, be absolutely true! But when you peel things back a little, asking, “Why is it this way?” “Who’s accountable for this?” It always comes back to the manager. Every manager’s job is to get their people performing at the highest levels possible. Not

Your People’s Performance Is A Reflection Of Your Performance

It’s impossible to be a top performing manager if your people aren’t performing! Yeah, I know that elicits a Duhhh response, but I’m not sure many managers have really internalized this. It’s far too easy to blame your people –They aren’t doing the right things, They’re lazy, They may not be the right people,… All that may, in fact, be absolutely true! But when you peel things back a little, asking, “Why is it this way?” “Who’s accountable for this?” It always comes back to the manager. Every manager’s job is to get their people performing at the highest levels possible.

Everyone Is Fighting A Battle You Know Nothing About!

Today, I had an unusual exchange of emails with a top executive (client and close friend). I’d sent, perhaps too casually, a note with a critique and suggestions on a project his team had been working on, somewhat related to the things I was doing with the organization. It was a very tough project, they had done a good job, despite the circumstances and restrictions they faced. But there were some areas that need to be addressed to help in executing the overall strategies and plans we’d been working on with the executive. I dashed off a quick note with the

Talent Trumps Everything!

Billions are invested in the latest sales and marketing automation tools. Billions are spent on training of all sorts. We spend countless hours looking at the right processes, the right systems, the right tools, the right metrics. Managers spend countless hours developing strategies and making sure plans/goals/programs/metrics are in place to execute the strategies as effectively and efficiently as possible. If managers are doing the right job, they are investing time in coaching and developing each person on their teams–getting them to reach the highest levels of performance. All of this is meaningless if you have the wrong people! Peter Drucker

Does What You Do Inspire You

I’ve spent the last couple of days at Dreamforce. It’s an astounding event, but for me, participating in Dreamforce has taken a big shift. I find myself spending more time meeting with people in one on one’s than attending the sessions in the event. This year, I noticed a shift in the conversations I had with many people. A few had recently made major job and career shifts. A few were in the final stages of making major shifts in their careers. A couple had gone through great personal tragedies in their lives and shared their experiences. Most of the conversations were

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Dave Brock

Dave Brock

You Get What You Measure/Compensate For!

What About Sales Person Retention?

Complacency

Automation: Are We Empowering Human Interaction Or Displacing It?

Account Based Everything Applies To Everything!

Is Job Hopping Inevitable?

Busyness Is Not Productiveness

Turning The Volume Up Won’t Get You More Attention

Leadership Is About Personal Responsibility And Action

Building Your Personal Brand

Your People’s Performance Is A Reflection Of Your Performance

Your People’s Performance Is A Reflection Of Your Performance

Everyone Is Fighting A Battle You Know Nothing About!

Talent Trumps Everything!

Does What You Do Inspire You

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Dave Brock

Dave Brock

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