Diary of an IT Sales Expert

A handful of genuinely useful practitioner insights are buried under long stretches of mutual affirmation, football tangents, and generic advice about work ethic and communication. The net useful ideas per minute is low for a 62-minute episode.

“I made a commitment, probably quite naively at the time, to go and see a customer every single week...it also set the tone with the organization, which is don't go and talk to David about customer stuff unless you really know what you're talking about”

“can we win it, can we deliver it, can we do it profitably? And every um, deal we would look through that lens”

The episode recycles well-worn B2B sales orthodoxy - listen more than you pitch, niche down, stay close to customers, get your team right - with only a couple of slightly fresher operational wrinkles (the weekly customer visit as an internal signalling mechanism, the three-question deal qualification lens). No contrarian or first-principles arguments appear.

“anybody that approached me directly unless they were recommended by someone”

“The best salespeople I found were able to sell to technical people so they could talk techie, but were able to equip those technical people to be able to sell internally to their stakeholders”

David Brooks is a genuine practitioner - eight-year CEO of a FTSE-listed company and then a PE-backed IT services business - not a career podcast guest. His experience is directly relevant to the target audience of IT/MSP operators. He does not, however, represent an exceptional or unusually hard-to-access calibre of guest.

“chief executive for eight years. And it was a start off as a turnaround and when we got IT growing both in the UK and internationally, we did some M and A, we did some organic growth”

“joined a private equity backed as you say, IT services business called Charterhouse and spent four years there. Ah, uh, sort of again a bit of a turnaround and then getting it growing back again”

There are a few concrete details - named companies (RM, Charterhouse), an Indian offshore operation, a 'less than half a point of margin' example, and the 2010 coalition government policy shift - but hard numbers, win rates, revenue figures, and named customer outcomes are almost entirely absent, leaving most claims at the anecdote level.

“we came out of um, the hardware market in universities because the customer just did these online auctions...you'd win some deals but you'd be getting less than half a point of margin on it sort of thing”

“we did our software development in India. We set up our own Indian office and we did a lot of uh, our uh, back office network management and support through India”

The host consistently interrupts with his own stories and opinions, delivers leading questions that contain the answer, and rarely pushes back on vague claims. The episode frequently stalls as the host speaks for extended periods, and no claim by the guest is meaningfully challenged.

“Yeah, sure, sure. Uh, totally agree. So talk to me about it. You know, these days at, you know, the front line support desk”

“And I think whilst don't digress and we're not going to focus on your mum, but that sort of background. I'm the same. My mum and my dad were very much driven”