Welcome!

Most of you are probably wondering what the hell "Grok" means. 

Before we go there, I have to credit my General Manager and Chief Technology Officer, Mike Hoskins, with the name of this blog.  I've had the privilege to work under Mike for the past few years at Pervasive Software.  Every other Tuesday morning, Mike gets the team together for an hour session to review customer success stories, R&D innovations and industry trends.  One morning, after reviewing examples of our how our technology supplements our clients' SOA (Services Oriented Architecture) strategies, he asked, "do you Grok it?"

As most everyone in the room, including me, instinctively looked aroundI searched through my memory banks for the word.  It's hard to admit that it didn't immediately register, but to be fair it had been more than 17 years since I first read it!

How many of you have ever read Stranger in a Strange Land(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land)by Robert Heinlein?  If you're twenty-something, odds are slim since the book was published in 1961!  It’s a great read about a radical concept…how a man born and raised on Mars returns to earth and integrates into the human culture. 

So let Mr. Heinlein’s words shed light on what it means to “Grok”…”’Grok’ means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed-to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience.”  Take a few seconds to think about this concept...

My wife, Anna, read the story and concluded that since the Martian eventually discovers sex as a means to Grok, that my blog really means “SalesSex”.  You’ll have to peruse the story to draw your own conclusion…but that’s not the intent!  Now there is the concept of “getting naked with the customer”, but we’ll leave that to another post...  

The essence of SalesGrok is the practice of getting inside the customer’s head, of understanding the customer, their needs, their wants, their goals and their dreams.  Based upon today’s hyper-competitive environment, the availability of information, the near real time access to multiple options to solve almost any business problem, I believe that putting this concept into practice is an absolute imperative for a successful sales career! 

So welcome to SalesGrok, a forum for Sales professionals with a particular focus on those of us who earn our keep in the fast-paced, ever-changing technology industry.

I look forward to the opportunity to collaborate with each of you on the strategy, methods, and best practices we can employ to discover what makes our customers tick and how to maximize their success (and our own) through creativity, innovation and thought-leadership. 

Until the next time, thanks for reading and happy selling!

Do you Grok it?