As we wind down Season 1, it’s time to quickly reflect on closing Q4 and getting ready for the next fiscal year.   How do you push for the final support of your customers if you are on a Fiscal Calendar year?  Does your Customer Success plan go out the window only to drive short-sales which will burn you in the future?   Let's not forget about getting ready for Sales Kick-offs! About the Host, Gary SloperFor 20 Years, Gary Sloper has led high-performing Tech Sales Engineering and Customer Success teams Globally.  Growing up as a programmer and eventually a Sales Engineer ..read more

This week we shift back to the world of Customer Success where we begin to carve out future episodes on metrics.  The first and often only metric which comes to mind in Customer Success is Churn.    Unfortunately, many professionals use the “Churn” metric in Customer Success interchangeably and sometimes forget to parse out variables in the business.  It’s also NOT the only metric used in the Customer Success organization, however, we’ll start here first.     Churn discussions: -       Churned Customer Logos (cancelled customers) -    ..read more

Today we sit down with arguably one of the best Solution Architects in the industry, Brad Loomis.  Based in Boston, he is the Director of Solution Architecture at Cloud Technology Partners a HP company.  Brad talks about early beginnings as a SA with Exodus Communications (later SAVVIS) who first commercialized the colocation and managed hosting business as we know today.  He shares tips and tricks on how to control your learning curve and ways he consumes material quickly. There are a couple of stories Brad shares around how to deal with sticky sales situations and building r ..read more

Today we hosted Tom Gleason from Snyk.io where he leads the Solution Engineering organization.  Snyk empowers software-driven businesses to develop fast and stay secure.  The Snyk open source offering is what many engineers are quite familiar with and I was eager to have Tom on and discuss the organization further.   Tom and I discuss his career background and how it has come full circle supporting customers in a pre-sales role and now a leader within Synk.  I highly encourage anyone interested in learning more about Snyk to check out their site or connect with Tom directl ..read more

The Career Opportunity this week is with Intensify who is searching for a Rockstar Customer Success Manager.  Check them out @ https://intentsify.io/careers/ learn more! Shown Notes:  This week we had the privilege of hosting Matt Toy, Director of Account Management with Fastly.  Fastly's edge cloud platform provides a content delivery network, Internet security services, load balancing, and video & streaming services for brands all over the world We dive into the various descriptions or assertions many have on what Customer Success is or should be vs. the reality.  On ..read more

Season 2 is finally here!  On this episode, we invited Paul McBratney, Senior Solution Engineer with Alert Logic based in Atlanta to join the show.  Paul brings a wealth of knowledge and background on the role of a PreSales Engineer, Problem Solver and Story Teller. Paul is a bi-lingual SE who discusses how getting your teeth cut early into areas such as physical devices (taking apart and rebuilding servers for example), troubleshooting and more helped him early on.  He walks through the conversation about how to methodically work with customers but also set the right expectati ..read more

Today we explore how to understand the global internet, WAN & LAN environments which is paramount for any pre-sales engineer.  While we understand IP subnetting, DHCP, routing and switching is not always glamourous it is necessary. :-) All Cloud workloads require the internet and possessing the knowledge to understand Layer 1-3 within the OSI model will propel you deeper with customers.  Why?  If your SaaS applications are slowly converging, how would you troubleshoot or begin to figure out a solution?  What if you provided branch location solutions and you didn't unde ..read more

Today we discuss the basic skill all Solution Architects require - listening.  Regardless of the tenure you possess,  effective listening skills in a  PreSales role is necessary.  Honestly, you need to nail this basic skill in all business positions however it's critically important as the technical leader in a sales opportunity you control your listening abilities.  If you miss the key driver or pain a customer faces during a discussion,  you could lose out on a partnership as there is no rewind in a deal! Article from the episode we cover by Melissa Daimler, fo ..read more

Show Notes: We hosted Claude Decarish, Areas SE Director for Windstream, based out of Atlanta to speak about staying relevant and how to build your career.   His team supports Next-Gen SDWAN services, Collaboration and Security Services for many large enterprise accounts.  Claude began his path to Presales as a Civil Engineer which provided an excellent foundation to move into technology.   I pressed him on the importance of relationship-building not just among your peers as Sales Engineers but the ever-critical role with Sales counterparts.  Claude talked about holding e ..read more

This week we talk about CenturyLink changing to Lumen and welcome our guest, Jay Hanley from Thrive.  Jay is a seasoned Solution Architect and it was awesome to host him on the show. Jay covers his background which began in Finance & Economics...nothing to do with Tech.  We're talking numbers, graphs, supply and demand all of the subjects many of us avoided so we could take a programming class, ha! In all seriousness, his background in business lends itself well when solving critical workload challenges with his customers.  He's not simply putting a demo together or explai ..read more