My current job is ‘Senior Strategic Success Manager’. My team works in Client Services department with the top 100 accounts. These accounts are our ‘priority accounts’ which are our largest contracts or have the potential to be our largest contracts. Our goal with these accounts is to make sure that they are having a successful experience with the product; that they are getting as much value out of it or many times more value out of it than what they are paying for. If marketing department is having a successful experience, they can show how using our tools to make data-driven decisions can turn into flight for sales. We look for expansion opportunities. We might have only one department using our product and we want to change that. Marketing works frequently with Sales so we want our product to spread to Sales. In my role, the strongest emphasis is on the business side and the communication relationship side because we work directly with clients. I can pull in technical resources if I need them but most of my time should be spent working with decision makers- the executives and directors so that they understand how they can leverage our software to improve their business and bridge the gap across many industries, departments or functions in the new organization. One day I might be talking to somebody in Sales in the Software industry, the next day I might be talking to an executive who’s in a Talent Agency or a Model Agency; and those business models are completely different. So bridging that helps on the business side as well as on the relationship side to make those connections add relevant value.Half of my time I get out in front of my clients and work with them. Facetime is a great product that I use. We build relationships with clients so that we can work together with them and help them solve some big problems. Without that relationship and face-to-face connect they don’t even share some of the biggest challenges they face. The other half time I come back to the office and work with everybody else. I work across the entire company to say, ‘Here are the challenges our clients are facing, we need to solve them.’ And that might include working with the product development team, software engineers, the consultant teams to get some professional services or support team to get certain tickets prioritized. Basically, it is across the whole company to make sure that our clients are successful.I had a customer who was in Stage 2 with data driven decision-making. The 1st stage is where the customer is trying to learn how to use the product. They are getting their first metrics in there, connecting to a couple of data sources and might just find to how to combine those data sources together to get a more holistic view of it for their business.Once they get a taste of what data can do, at 2nd stage they start to track everything. This customer had a dashboard with more than 80 metrics on it. On that page they had to scroll and scroll in order to get through all of it everyday. It started getting overwhelming. In fact it started to be so much that they stopped working at it. Working with this customer we went through a series of questions. It guided the thinking to identify what’s going on in their minds versus the goals they are trying to achieve. What are the metrics they need to improve. What the drivers to those metrics are. We look for drivers that have high impact and that they have high influence over. We then look for what are the decisions they have to make and the questions they have before they make those decisions. Basically we craft these on a paper or a whiteboard. Once a simple framework of Key Performance Metrics (KPM), the desired result, drivers and decisions are outlined, we finally get down to the specific data needed.With this customer we were able to take that dashboard with 80 cards or visualizations of metrics cut down to 20 to 25, which made it easier for them to read every single day to know how well they’re doing against the weekly/ monthly/ annual goals. As a result they would use it and make decisions out of it every day. It cleaned the clutter and cleared the noise. The data story was so clear to them that they could make better decisions and get better results with less stress.

What I enjoy the most is seeing the lights go on in other people’s eyes when they see how data when used right can accelerate and improve their decision-making process. Most people struggle making decisions especially when lots of money or their jobs are on the line. There are high stakes and they resist decisions or they make them blind. But with data used well they can make those decisions with greater confidence and impact, and when that light turns on for them that’s fun. That is what I enjoy most.