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Today’s show featured an interview with Russ Broomell, Head of Sales – Americas – PowerDNS.com Inc.
Find Russ on LinkedIn.
RUSS’ TIP: “That phrase, ‘If the pressman doesn’t like it, it ain’t going to work,’ has stayed with me since the 1990s, and it still applies to every sales situation I’ve been in. No matter how senior the buyer is, I’ve learned that the people actually using your product—the ones with their hands on it—are the ones who make or break the deal.”
✅ The real influencers aren’t always at the top. End users—like press operators, admins, or engineers—can make or break a deal based on their experience with your product.
✅ Get the ground truth before the boardroom pitch. Talking to the people who actually use the technology uncovers insights and blockers that execs and procurement might not even be aware of.
✅ Relationships still matter—especially with users. Building trust with everyday users can uncover deal-closing intel and build lasting loyalty beyond just the contract signers.
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: We got Russ Broomell. Russ, tell us a little bit of an introduction. Let us know who you are.
Russ Broomell: I’ve been in sales my whole life but only in the last five years I’ve actually had sales in my title. I’ve led sales teams and done sales activity in all kinds of stuff. These days I am selling the patently-unsexy software, is maybe the least sexy software you can have, but it is the core of the internet. Our customers are big companies that are internet service providers. It’s super interesting to me, but very dull to most people who don’t know how the internet runs.
Fred Diamond: There’s a lot of boring software out there. I used to sell mainframe technology fixes. It was worth a couple billion dollars per year. This was back in the ‘90s. Russ, I’m excited to hear your sales story. Russ Broomell, tell us a great sales story.
Russ Broomell: I want to go way, way back. My title was marketing manager and I was working for what was then a standalone company, Konica. Today they’re merged with Minolta and other folks. We were in their commercial film and paper division. That’s the stuff that printers used to make printing plates from back in the day before everything was digital.
My boss told me, “Go out and walk around with some of the salespeople, meet some of the customers. You’re in marketing, you need to know what customers like.” Okay, great. I went to Indianapolis first and went to the big newspaper in Indianapolis, suit and tie and everything. We walk into the procurement office and a couple hour meeting with the procurement people, and this is what the sales guys do. Just debrief afterwards. In the afternoon we go out and see a large commercial printer and talk to their CEO and stuff. “Okay, this is what salespeople do. No problem. Understand. Sales is very boring. What is this?”
I went up the next day to Detroit and actually went around with the number one sales guy in the company. We walked into the Detroit Free press, the big newspaper in Detroit, and we didn’t walk in the front office. We walked in the back loading dock and we went through the press room and he shook everybody’s hand and he told stories and he heard about people’s holidays and talked about their kids. We had little handouts, little utility knives. You probably have one in your drawer, Fred, the little kinds we break off the end of the blade, super useful. Handed those out by the dozen to everybody.
After about an hour and a half, we finally make our way to the procurement person and sit down with them and have a great meeting. Same thing, in the afternoon, we go out to a commercial printer and he goes right into the press room and he’s talking with everybody and meeting everybody. Now, the conversations were similar. When you talk to the procurement person, you ask about their family and what’s going on. You talk to the press person, you ask about their family, what’s going on? I went and said, “Why? Is this just you’re just a super outgoing person? Is this what you’re doing?”
He said, “Well, my territory is Michigan. It’s not the best territory in the world, but you will see that I’m leading the company.” He said, “If the pressman doesn’t like it, it ain’t going to work.” You got to make friends with the pressman. You got to make friends with everybody who’s using the product. I was blown away that sales was not about quoting a price and coming to a contract. Sales was about knowing all the people and all of their needs and all of that stuff. It opened my eyes to a very, very different kind of thing, that I was looking outside, looking in, you go, the sales guys as they go and have meetings with the C-level and whatnot. I have carried that little nugget, “If the press guy don’t like it, it ain’t going to work.” I’ve carried that with me now since last century.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great example. A lot of people who are listening to the Sales Game Changers Podcast are B2B and B2G, business to government, typically enterprise sales. A lot of people when they start out, they think it’s about having a conversation. But what they don’t realize is in a lot of the bigger deals, there may be 6, 10, 12 people involved in the decision. Even someone like the press guy who may not necessarily be involved in the buying decision, he can give feedback along the way. If he gives feedback, just a random person that you don’t know about, because you’re focused on the director of IT, the C-suite, and procurement, because they’re the ones who are going to negotiate.
We hear this all the time, Russ, “They lost the deal.” Well, why’d you lose the deal? You don’t know all this perfect information. You know that the procurement guy is negotiating with you, that your big competitor is whomever, and there’s a report out there that says that you’re better than them, and that they’ve seen that report. But a lot of times we lose deals because of something like that. It’s not because of the pricing, it’s not because of a feature. It’s because someone, maybe someone in admin who uses it every day says, “This doesn’t print right.” I remember I heard that story once a long time ago where a customer said, “We lost a big deal because they couldn’t figure out how to print.” I worked for Apple Computer and there was a certain way you would hit print, but if you knew how to use the DOS machines, you had to do like five keys. Well, this person knew the five keys and she couldn’t figure out how to make them print on the Apple.
Well, that’s a great story. I could picture you going into the back room. I could picture you going in the front room, and as a marketing person, you wore your suit that day. When I worked at Apple Computer, I was in marketing as well, my boss said, “You’re going to be in every sales meeting. They’re not going to know why you’re there, but eventually you’re going to start adding value.” Give us a tip that you learned from those stories.
Russ Broomell: That phrase, “If the pressman doesn’t like it, it ain’t going to work,” that applies to everything. Like you said, and today we have fancy words for that like multithreading the deal and things like that. I’ve put that into practice in every kind of sales role, even having officially sales in my title now. I want to talk to the users. I want to talk to the people who are in software, the administrators of the software, the people who are making the servers run. Because they will tell me, “Hey, by the way, so and so was in here last week talking to us. By the way, we’re upgrading to that, it’s going to break you,” or something. Procurement won’t know that. The C-suite won’t know that. The folks who operate won’t know that.
I’ve pushed back on CEOs and sales managers over the years who say, “No, no, no, no. Go to the C-suite. Go talk to the executive vice president.” Hang on, I’ll get there. But I need to go here first and find out what the game on the ground is. In coaching people and helping them figure that out, I say, “Just go to the people who are using your stuff. Go to the people who are using what you sell.” You will learn way more than you’ll get from the executive and the procurement person and everybody else.
Fred Diamond: A lot of times we talk on the Sales Game Changers Podcast and at the Institute for Excellence in Sales that it’s really easy to get a first meeting with someone in IT. Especially if you’re going to offer a demo, they want to see technology. They may not be able to have a decision or they’re not going to make a change, but for them to have value at the company, they need to know what everybody’s doing. They’ll see demos and they’ll see a lot of demos and they’ll go watch demos, et cetera. I love what you just said, knowing who to ask those types of questions to, to get an information nugget that you’re not going to get from the C-suite or director of procurement who are basically looking at you as a line on a spreadsheet as compared to where all the nuances and everything you’re going through.
Russ Broomell: I can’t count the number of times that I have gotten the little bit of nugget of information that actually closed the deal from somebody who is not at the buyer’s table, they’re not signing anything, but they’ve told me, “Yeah, we can probably roll this software out in about two weeks. It won’t take us the six weeks or three months, or whatever the other guys are talking about.” “Oh, let me go tell the CEO that.” All kinds of stuff.
Fred Diamond: I can picture the guy in Detroit who went through the back door and he probably had some of the grease on his hands from shaking hands with the press guy. I like the fact that he brought all the things. One of the challenges we talk about in sales is that relationships are very important. They’re not the most important thing anymore because customer have access to data and to AI to help them make better financial decisions along the way. You need to be at that level as a sales professional. But knowing the people who are using your technology and using your solutions can lead to a lot of long-term success.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo