Experience is often the best teacher

Last night, I was happy to see Seattle Seahawks and Coach Pete Carroll reach the pinnacle of football success. Some may call me a bandwagon fan, given that this was my first year following the team. However, I feel that the Seahawks played an important role in my family's adjustment to living in Seattle after years in Utah. Their magical run through the season and their hard-fought playoff success caught the attention of even my wife and oldest daughter, both of whom care very little about professional sports of any kind. The entire community fell in love with this team and the way they played their hardest seemingly all the time, and my whole family got caught up in the excitement.

At the heart of this Seahawk team is Pete Carroll, whose style permeates the entire team from top to bottom. He and John Schneider have built this team based on a blueprint that they had in their minds when they arrived in Seattle 4 years ago. The players put in the hours in the workout room and in practice and executed beautifully on so many occasions this season, but the coach was the one who brought it all together. At 62, he is one of the oldest coaches in the NFL today, but his youthful and energetic attitude cannot be denied. He helped to rebuild this team from scratch and he and his staff molded this team into the most fearsome in the league.

Now, before going any further, I must admit the cheering for Pete Carroll was not easy for me at first. As an avid college football fan who has a strong distaste for USC (my favorite teams are BYU and Michigan), I didn't have a very high opinion of him when I arrived in Seattle a year ago. He repeatedly "stole" recruits from both of my favorite schools and the Trojans' success under him made him seem smug and even slimy. When the truth came out about the Reggie Bush situation, I was one of the many who pointed a finger at the coach and felt vindicated in my belief that his success came though cheating. When he suddenly left USC for Seattle, it appeared that he was running from the scene of the crime.

On top of all that, Pete Carroll was supposed to be a failure as an NFL head coach. Before finding success at USC, he had been fired by both the Jets and the Patriots. Even worse, the Patriots turned into a dynasty soon after Carroll was shown the door, implying that his coaching was holding them back. He had shown great promise as a position coach, but it seemed that the spotlight of being a head coach in the NFL was too bright for him to handle.

With all of this as background, imagine my surprise when I arrived in Seattle, to find that practically the whole town loves Pete Carroll. Having grown up in Detroit, where I was an avid fan of the worst franchise in professional football, I was very excited to be living in a town with an NFL team. I immediately read up on the team and realized that they were headed for an exciting season with a lot of young and energetic players. Russell Wilson, Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman were names that I had heard, but the more I learned about this team the more I liked it. I have always loved hard-nosed, physical football where the goal is for the team to impose its will on its opponents. This Seahawks team was built to do just that, and the architect of this attitude was Pete Carroll. And the Super Bowl was the culmination, a total physical domination of a skilled opponent from the opening kickoff until the game was well in hand.

In the joy of celebrating the Seahwks win with my kids, I watched a lot of post game interviews. One interview in particular stock out in my mind, I don't even remember who the interviewer was. Someone asked Pete Carroll what is was like to win this game at the same location where he was fired after his first season as an NFL head coach. Something changed in Pete's countenance ever so slightly so show that the subject was not a pleasant one for him. He recovered and gave a respectful response, but his initial reaction taught me a lot about Pete Carroll.

Most successful people are driven to succeed and they can visualize what success looks like and make a plan to get there. The vast majority have not always been successful, but they have learned from failure and used it to cement their vision of success. I can't be sure, but it seems to me that Pete Carroll used his past failures to figure out how to succeed as an NFL coach and this Seahawk team is the result of his vision for success. It appears that he has known since day one in Seattle what it would take to get to this point, and gained that knowledge the hard way.

Just like sports, success in business requires hard work and vision. Some business leaders are born with that vision and run at the front from day one. However, I find that the most successful leaders have failed multiple times throughout their careers, and what they learn from those failures shapes their vision of what true success looks like. And just like Pete Carroll's vision has lifted a team and a whole fanbase, great business leaders lift those around them and bring their vision of success to reality.

How I failed at sales and services...and what I learned from it

I haven't posted to my blog since I left Utah and came to Seattle to work for Amazon. It has been a little more than 5 months and I miss writing, but I have been awfully busy. I love my new job, I love the area, and our family is treating this move as a new adventure.

I was lying in bed tonight trying to get to sleep when I realized a truth about myself and my career that had missed until now. I pulled out my computer right away to capture my thoughts before they were washed away by a night of sleep. Hopefully my story will help someone out there who falls into the same profile as I do. I know it may seem to have very little to do with BI, but I think it teaches a lesson that can be applied within any discipline.

I did not get into Professional Services by choice, I was led there by the skills I was blessed with in this life. I studied Computer Science in college and expected to get a job as a typical programmer upon graduation. I figured I would code for my entire life and never work closely with customers. But unlike many programmers, I love talking and have a gift for explaining technical concepts to people without a technical background.

In the final interview for my first job coming out of college, the interviewer decided to recommend me for a position that required direct interaction with customers. I accepted a position writing customized code to exchange data between my company's proprietary system and and other systems used by our clients. This position required me to work very closely with our clients to design exactly how the data would move within their environment so that the solution I built would meet their needs. I spent a great deal of time on-site with customers as well as on the phone.

While I enjoyed the team on which I worked as well as the actual coding, I was not good at customer service. As a programmer, I felt that the customers didn't understand what I did and when things went wrong I often blamed them for my problems. Now, I never did it to their faces, but in hindsight what I did was almost as bad. I wanted new challenges and so I ended up with too much work to be effective and made both myself and my customers miserable. The quality of the code I wrote was good and I worked very hard, so I actually got great evaluations and was considered a valuable asset.

After 5 years, it was time for me to move to a position where I could focus on programming. I moved to a data visualization start-up as a Java developer and was happy to code with no interruptions from customers. However, after less than a year, I was asked to help get a Professional Services team up and running. Clients were having trouble implementing our software and so a team was being created to enable more sales by assisting in that process. Remembering my previous struggles with customers, I cautiously accepted an offer to spend 6 months on this new team. I enjoyed the challenge presented by each new client, but again I found the interaction with them bothersome. They always demanded more than I felt I was able to provide and I struggled to avoid ugly confrontations over unrealistic expectations. Again, hard work and technical ability covered for my poor customer skills and I was viewed as being successful in that role.

Once the 6 months came to an end, I gladly returned to product development. Interestingly enough, my knowledge of what customers expected from our software made me a better engineer and I thrived during this time. But after only 6 months, an opportunity came up that changed the course of my career. Our company was launching a sales initiative in Europe and needed a Sales Engineer to help in the effort. I knew almost nothing about sales, but they offered me the job because I knew the software as well as anyone and could talk to customers without tripping over myself. Little did I know at the time, how closely sales and services were related and that I was headed for my greatest professional failure.

I loved my job. It was exciting and exotic and I was having a great time. The sales team I worked with was awesome and we worked hard and played hard together. I was travelling to Europe every other month and recruiting partners to help us sell and implement our software. The challenge was overwhelming, many people told me that we could never be successful in the short-term. That only made me work harder to prove them wrong and to find success in the new part of my career. Six months in, I was at dinner in Rome with my Sales Director when that world came crashing down.

The home office called to let him know that he was being let go. A few days later, I was back in the office and being told that I would not be able to stay in sales. The European efforts were being scaled back significantly and there were no other positions available. The VP of Sales told me that he had been planning to let me go, but that the Services team had an opening and would take me back. As a young father with 4 children and a wife at home, I accepted the move to Services, but inside I was seething. I thought that the VP must be blind not to see my talents, what he would lose by taking me out of a sales role. I vowed to find a new job as soon as possible. It took 6 months of careful searching, but once I found an alternative I took it without a second thought.

The new job was a poor fit to say the least. I ended up as a BI Engineer in charge of implementing the software of the company that I had just left for one of their largest clients. Instead of looking within to understand why the VP of Sales had not seen me as indispensable, I turned to what I knew was a safe job. I actually enjoyed several aspects of that job, but after two years I needed a change. What came next was a crazy ride that taught me a great deal about who I really am.

My previous employer had been acquired by a very aggressive new start-up that wanted to change the face of BI. I wanted badly to be a part of what they were doing and reached out to my former co-workers looking for a fit. I wanted to get back into Sales, but they were in stealth mode and didn't need Sales Engineers. So, by several twists and turns, I ended up back in Services. The Client Services organization was run by some very smart people and was well-organized, but I still had not learned from my past failures. I took on too many responsibilities and tried to maneuver my way into Sales while I should have been focused on execution of the work in front of me. Once again, my technical abilities and hard work kept me from drowning completely, but I was miserable. I was working 80 or more hours a week and dreading work each morning.

This time, I didn't have to look for an exit. A recruiter from Amazon.com reached out to me when I was at a low point. I wasn't quite sure why, but I responded to her message and before I knew it I was living in Seattle. Once again, I am a BI Engineer, but this time I love it. Amazon is a great place to work and the environment fits me very well. I still have a ton to learn and I make all kinds of mistakes, but I am learning and enjoying myself.

So what is he point of this story? Only through the lens of what I have experienced could I truly understand what it is like to work for the world's most customer-centric company. To be great at Sales or Services, you must want to serve your customers. They can never be seen an annoyance or an obstacle. What they want and need must be at the center of everything you do. The real challenge for you is to make their problems your problems and partner with them to solve them as equals.

In Sales, prospects who feel you understand their needs will be much more willing to listen. In Services, customers who know that your number one priority is their satisfaction. Clever and talented as you may be, you can never fully succeed with customers unless you care more about them than you do about your own bottom line.

Why Data About Your Customers is so Valuable

Having spent a good portion of my professional career working directly with clients, I have learned a lot about what their expectations are when they engage a consultant. Simply put, business clients purchase software and services with the expectation that their company will benefit in ways that outweigh the costs. From a sales and marketing perspective, service providers need to assure prospective customers that their offering will provide more return and better value than the offerings of their competitors.

The vast majority of money spent in public-sector businesses ultimately leads back to consumer purchases. In many cases there is a complex hierarchy of solutions and services that support that buying activity, but in the end the trail leads back to a consumer purchase. Whatever part a particular company may play in this process, to be successful they must understand what motivates their customers (businesses or consumers) and leverage that information in a meaningful way.

Many people have written about creating loyalty among customers and how much value that can create over time. A common practice of late is for service providers to create organizations focused on Customer Success whose primary purpose is to ensure that customers are happy and ultimately remain customers. These organizations need data to understand the effectiveness of the methods they employ. Simply looking at the retention rate does not tell the complete story and won’t give a business the information that it really needs to make necessary adjustments quickly enough to gain an advantage over their competitors.

Businesses that target consumers rather than businesses face a more traditional challenge when trying to understand what motivates their customers. While the challenge to develop a loyal customer base for consumer products has been around since man first began to barter, it has changed in fundamental ways. Social media and the increased capacity for direct communication are definitely game-changing technologies that must be taken into account. Consumers have more choice than they have ever had, as the Internet has created a worldwide market for even everyday purchases. In a world where consumers have virtually unlimited options, brands need to create loyalty through extraordinary customer service.

Mobile technology means that consumers are no longer tied to their PCs when shopping online. A few years back I realized the potential impact of mobile when I began doing online price checks while shopping. This allowed me to better understand the actual value of items that I saw in stores. On top of that there are the customer reviews that seemingly go hand-in-hand with e-commerce today. Wondering about a TV on sale in a local store? Jump online and check reviews to make sure your aren’t buying a lemon. While online you can check to see if you can get a better price somewhere else.

Now, I can buy practically anything from anywhere via my mobile phone and its connection to the Internet. The current consumer environment requires that companies create and maintain loyalty in order to maximize profits. Prices are only part of the equation, as service and convenience can often override a slightly lower price. The vast majority of consumers are motivated only by self-interest, wanting the best value for their money. As a result, effective businesses will need to understand how to make their customers feel that shopping with them is in their best interests. The best way to do that is by gathering information about their key customers and using that information to develop a customer experience that maximizes the number of loyal customers.

A New Outlook for the new year

I haven't blogged here in a long time. However I am feeling that I need to spend more time writing. Working at a start-up has made life very busy, and sometimes when you are busy your priorities get out of whack. Writing is therapeutic for me in a number of ways, as it helps me to better organize my thoughts and gain focus. I also enjoy the challenge of producing something that might be of interest to others, the true test of anyone producing content in any forum. I have written a couple of articles for the Domo (my employer) blog and enjoyed the challenge of producing content in a more structured environment. However I love having my own blog where I can feel free to express whatever I am feeling.

January is a new start for everyone, but especially so for me as I celebrate my birthday this month. In a week I will turn 39 and that has me thinking a lot about what I want to accomplish over the next 12 months. Time moves very quickly fo me, too quickly most of the time, and we can never get it back. Often we focus on the big decisions we make in life, the ones that can have a huge impact on how our lives progress. However I would argue that many of the seemingly minor decisions we make are even more important. Big decisions like employment changes or choosing a school for our children often end up being made for us by the little choices we make every day. Deciding to stay at work a few minutes extra to finish one last task can have a huge impact over time. Taking a few minutes each night to read to your children before bed can lead to them developing a love of learning.

We often talk about the fact that some people are "penny wise and pound foolish", to imply that most of the time they make smart financial decisions but then waste large sums of money with rash decisions. But we rarely talk about those who do the opposite, who spend frivolously on small items and therefore never have the money for big ticket purchases. As one who likes to bring a lunch from home, I am surprised by how often co-workers that eat out every day complain that they don't have money to buy the things they want.

In business there are many companies that make good strategic decisions, but are doomed to mediocrity or worse because they fail to execute on a day-to-day basis. One of the greatest values of Business Intelligence is the ability to see how the little choices we make impact our key objectives. You may do a great job of hiring productive employees, but if you don't manage them effectively then it doesn't do you much good. Collecting the right data and knowing how to interpet it can help a manager keep their team efficient on a daily basis and produce great results over time. Little adjustments made at the right time can have a much more powerful effect than big course corrections made after poor performance shows up in the bottom line.

The role of emotion and momentum in business

As I sit here watching my beloved Detroit Tigers get thrashed by a seemingly inferior Giants team, a lot of thoughts have gone through my mind. After the initial anger and disappointment subsided, I began to reflect on how this game represents a pattern that we often see in the business world. For the second time in 6 years, the Tigers entered the World Series following a sweep in the ALCS. In both cases the team that they faced was coming off a 7 game series.

Conventional logic would dictate that the Tigers would have the advantage in that situation, having had time to rest and set up their rotation. However, in both cases they were soundly beaten in Game 1, showing obvious rust due to the time off. In 2006, the Cardinals carried the momentum from that game to an easy series win. I, along with my fellow long-suffering Tiger fans, can only hope that the series plays out differently this year.

So what are the parallels to this situation in the business world? How do the same emotion and momentum that give one team so much advantage over another on the playing field affect competition in the business world? As a business intelligence professional, the question I ask myself is, "Can we come up with a way to accurately measure the momentum of a company or the emotion of its employees?"

Many in the business world consider momentum in terms of revenue growth. "Up and to the right" is the pattern that they are looking for. You hear terms like double-digit growth thrown around with regularity. Startups are trying to catch lighting in a bottle and make a big splash, while larger companies are trying to build market share and fend off competitors. Sales numbers tell part of the story but, at least in the technology industry, real momentum comes from creating innovative products and services. As a result, any accurate analysis must take a holistic approach looking at the company as a whole and extending out to the market in general.

Innovation within your company can only be truly measured by comparing to the other companies in your market space, and must provide ever-increasing value to your customers in order to achieve the desired result of increased profits. For software companies, the agile development methodology offers a myriad of key indicators to track innovation within your product based on the rate at which new features are being introduced. However, the true value of that innovation lies in creating features that entice new customers to purchase your product and add value for existing customers to increase their loyalty.

Emotion often goes hand in hand with momentum in both sports and business. Just speaking with an employee of a company with positive momentum will often get you excited about what they are doing. The energy of a growing company becomes infectious and encourages employees to put forth fanatical effort to keep the ball moving forward. Customers often feel this in their associations with such companies, noting that the employees are willing to do whatever it takes to create happy customers. On the other hand, stagnant companies often result in dissatisfied employees whose lack of enthusiasm for what they are doing is readily apparent to those with whom they interact.

In business, just like sports, the numbers often do not tell the whole story. The goal that we need to focus on is creating better metrics that take into account the idea of momentum and emotion. Such metrics would help us to quantify the elements that play such an important role in the short and long-term success of any company.

Thoughts on the end of round one of Domosocial

Things have been super busy here at Domo, and I haven't had time to write. Since I am now Domosocial certified, I wanted to write about some of the things that I learned and how they apply to Business Intelligence. The initiative was announced two months ago, and has impacted our company in a pretty major way. Yet in the end, my personal use of social media hasn't changed much outside of the activities that I undertook in order to complete the requirements.

I had been completely in the dark about Twitter up until a few months ago, but I can't really attribute my newfound awareness of that platform to this initiative because that happened beforehand. I love Twitter as a news source, although I admit that I am a bit of a lurker and still haven't found a good way to leverage it as a tool for interacting with the world. I see others around me that have established a great Twitter presence and I hope to find the time in the future to work on that for myself.

Most of the technologies I will never use again unless I need to for my job. Still, using them for a time was a great experience because now I can understand others when they discuss these technologies. As a Business Intelligence consultant, I need to be familiar with a wide variety of technologies in order to be able to help my customers deal with data from any system that they may use in their business.

Moving forward I will definitely be more inclined to try out new technologies in the effort to better understand how they work and what the have to offer. Working for Domo has been awesome so far and we look forward to moving forward from the Domosocial experiment and continuing to take on the challenge of making BI easier more effective.

Read more about Domosocial here.

Crowdsourced information

Crowdsourcing is changing the way we live, even if you don't notice it at first. A person with access to the internet has more information available to them than the sum of all information available throughout history prior to the last few years. But how do you sort through all of the useless information and find what you are looking for. Crowdsourcing is actually on of the biggest factors in this information explosion, as people are putting massive amount of data into the internet ecosystem. Interestingly enough, user-generated data can both help and hurt our efforts to sift through the haystack and find the needles we are looking for

I saw a video recently where the founder of ShareThis talked about sharing replacing search, as people are more interested in what other people think than the results of a computer algorithm. Social network recommendations can help us find trusted sources of information and a variety of other internet resources. For years my family has relied on product reviews found on the sites of a number of internet retailers to help us identify strengths and weaknesses of different options before making purchase decisions. For the most part, we have found the information provided by those reviews to be very reliable. Theses cases show the value of crowdsourced information, provided by users who are most often not being compensated in any way for their contribution.

On the other hand, the volume of user-entered data on the internet can get in the way when we are trying to find very detailed information. I recently purchased an aquarium for my family and was looking for advice on the care and feeding of my new fish. There were some cases where a single Google search resulted in three or more opinions that contradicted one another. Similarly, when I was researching some unusual health troubles, I found far too many responses that provided no indication of the credentials of the author. Services like Yahoo Answers are very interesting, yet I have found many reasons to question the validity of the information they provide. Wikipedia suffers from similar concerns about the accuracy and validity of certain articles.

In addition, these examples of the results of generally well-intentioned efforts are further complicated by those who maliciously wish to mislead others by manipulating open systems. Companies have been found to enter fake reviews of their own products in the hopes of increasing sales. Then there are those who wish to promote their personal agendas by intentionally providing incorrect information.

It will be interesting to see how society evolves to deal with this divergence. As someone very interested in data quality, I see a number of ways to approach these issues with technology we already have available to us. Twitter dealt with fake accounts for famous individuals by providing a method of verifying an account. Other sites limit the volume of information by setting tight access controls on content creation or by having a small set moderators. Many online answer sites allow users to rate responses so that invalid or misleading responses drop in search results and impact fewer searchers. No one answer is perfect, but the various solutions offer us insight on how we can leverage to benefits of crowdsourced data and minimize the dangers.