WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO TALK ABOUT?
I’ve given speeches in a variety of settings, from high tech, to academic, to health care. Below are a few topics that I speak on regularly, but I can also customize presentations.
From Loss to Leadership: Business Lessons from a Cancer Crisis
This is probably my most general speech, and is applicable to all types of managers, executives, and high-performing employees. During the presentation, we explore the lessons that I learned during my wife’s battle with cancer that have strong applicability to building better leadership and decision-making.
Disruptive Innovation
As the pace of change continues to accelerate, how do you ensure you aren’t left behind? This topic explores business model disruption from a variety of different perspectives — why it’s important, how to do it, and how to defend against it. Content is always customized to the industry being addressed to ensure that you get practical examples you can relate to and concrete strategies that you can immediately implement. This topic is primarily applicable to organizational executives.
The Start-Up Scene: Opportunity or Time Sink
One of the biggest challenges sales organizations face is to determine whether to focus on start-ups, how to do it, and which ones to emphasize. Having a systematic approach to start-ups to drive significant organizational growth. But the wrong approach can lead to a significant drain on sales time and resources with little to no benefit. This topic will provide sales leaders and individual contributors with a systematic framework that is industry-specific and can immediately be implemented to ensure the right approach is taken. If you’re interested in a deeper view of what I’m talking about, check out this cover story I wrote on the topic for Representor Magazine, the publication of the Electronic Representative Association. (Representor Article)
Relationship Building in a Technology-Driven World
Whether you’re in customer acquisition, management, or retention, if you’ve been around sales for long enough, you’re probably wistfully reminiscing about the good old days when the folks you called on actually wanted to visit with you in person. Of course, that’s not the world we live in or are migrating toward. So what do you do when your customer never wants to meet with you? Assuming personal relationships will still matter (they will), then how do you build a trusting relationship with someone that never wants to see you. This topic is mostly applicable for any individual contributor or manager in a customer-facing position and offers practical advice on how to thrive in a world that is being fundamentally transformed by technology
Driving a Lean Start-Up Approach to Business
The Lean methodology is nothing new to start-ups. But as it turns out, many of the principles of lean start-up are just as applicable to larger enterprises. This topic helps executives at larger companies understand lean start-up’s application to their world and provides practical frameworks to immediately begin affecting change in their departments or organizations.
For-Profit Lessons for the Non-Profit World
There are a remarkable number of similarities between the problems and constraints faced by start-ups and those that impact non-profits. The convergence is intensifying as the focus on social venture and earned revenue models increases in the non-profit sector. This topic is geared toward senior leaders in the non-profit world and explores how a wide variety of strategies and approaches that come to us from the entrepreneurial world can be applied into the non-profit sector to increase success.
HOW DOES THIS WORK?
Firstly, it’s important to me to make sure any presentation I give has immediate application. If someone takes the time to attend a presentation, they should be excited or engaged during the talk. But just as importantly, they need to be able to walk away with the confidence that the speaker understood their business or personal concerns and gave them immediately actionable content.
Any time I don’t deliver this experience, I consider it a very personal failure.
I have two types of presentations I like to give. The first is as a 60-minute keynote speech with time for audience Q&A. The second is as a hands-on break-out session ranging from 2-4 hours for a smaller group. If you’re interested, please contact me at contact@alexgabbi.com.
WHAT OTHERS HAVE TO SAY
“Alex hit the ball out of the park! His knowledge of our industry and of the start-up scene was amazing. He combined the real world of making the number and focusing on the longer-term market development both interesting and spot on! I could have listened to him for another hour. It was great time spent for me and our conference attendees.” – Walter Tobin, President, ERA
Here are a few clients that I’ve worked with recently. If you would like to contact any of them, please let me know.
- Myriad Genetics
- Electronic Rep Association (ERA)
- Electronic Component Industry Association (ECIA)
- The University of Texas
Also, here are a few sample videos of my speaking in a variety of settings.