Articles by Dave Brock

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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.  […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]