The most important takeaway here is that the customer is willing to negotiate timing and scope. The 12wk plan was actually 1yr and the author is still around to write this.
If your colleagues claim the sky is falling because a software development timeline was wrong, they're not cut out for software development.
My favorite fight search tool was hipmunk. Their 'agony' sort was my favorite feature in any software ever. SAP bought them, and I was so hopeful that Concur would bake this into their god awful app that I had to use for work. No luck. RIP Hipmunk.
I used to work at Hipmunk, stayed until it got shot down.
SAP Concur approached us to use our auto-completion algorithm/database to power their new UI or whatever. Apparently the 2 or 3 different DB they already had for that exact use case were not good enough.
Our result were sorted by population size of the destination, The concur people could not believe it was that only that.
Usually I determine the money range required to live the lifestyle I want. Once competing offers hit that threshold, then I take money off the table as a evaluation criteria.
Usually it comes down to a single question for me. How likely is it that this job ruins a family vacation? I've had that too many times, and I'm not doing that anymore. If I catch at least a hint of that likelihood, I'm out. Quality of life outside of work is the most important for me right now.
Worked at a company that had a business line offering a professional service to saas firms. We got into the saas game ourselves and leaned on our existing customers to analyze their calls. I was the 'machine' in our machine learning lol.
One on my major takeaways from the calls was how many people were visibly sick yet still working and getting on calls. WFH has really destroyed the concept of stay home and get some rest.
That said, I've definitely called in to things while sick because I didn't have anything better to do. Watching TV all day wasn't going to make me get healthier faster than watching a business presentation, and as long as my team understood that I was a little out of it, the normalcy of being "at work" helped me not just feel lazy and terrible.
I preach ”don’t be a martyr” to anyone and everyone that listens, especially when I’m on a call and they mention they are not feeling well. Sure - there are meetings and engagements you really don’t want to miss (stuff like the boss’s boss will be on the call) but as long as you are not calling in sick all the time, no one cares! They usually say “oh shit I hope they feel better” and stop thinking about you.
At companies that are very customer centric, often times the calls are shared with customer success and implementation teams ensuring your goals as expressed during the buying phase are aligned with the implementation. This allows shorter implementation timeframes and higher likelihood of you achieving your goals and having a positive impact on your company. However, I'm sure that the majority of time the recordings sit in cloud cold storage until they expire and are deleted, never to be heard again.
Isn't it more about finding patterns to find a script for sales to use to get better at closing the sale? Things like people keep bring up the price.. here is what works at shifting the conversation or customers are impressed with the report page but hate the homepage.. start the demo off on the report pages.
Things that help the company but not really customer in any direct way.
I can't speak for all companies, but from what I've observed at my past few employers, recordings aren't generally analyzed in that way.
This comes from the context of Sales or Success at B2B SaaS, but I've seen recordings used in the following ways:
* Keep a record of what was said/agreed upon during a meeting for future reference e.g. we will deliver X on Y date to Z contact
* Share with someone who should have been there, but was unable to attend the meeting
* Share a relevant snippet with people outside of the meeting attendees. e.g. product feedback, services opportunity, etc.
* Capture customer praise so everyone feels good about themselves/the product
The vast majority of recordings are never viewed again to my knowledge.
