Category: Start Ups

2002: Quit Humping The Intern’s Leg

Bad dog! No intern!

Sometimes people suggest I know nothing of male/female relationships in the workplace because I’m gay. To the contrary, metaphorically I’m in the stands so what I see is a different and possibly better view from those on the field (so to speak).

I asked one of the senior analysts if I could speak with him privately. I said: “Quit humping the leg of the intern.” Now, to be clear, he was a good man with strong ethics and very professional. I can’t read minds, but my guess is that he got his signals crossed.

Image courtesy of Tenor

The intern in question sat at the desk next to me. So I saw firsthand how uncomfortable she was with the attention from the senior analyst. (Finding reasons to drop by her desk every few hours, trying to get to know her personally with questions, etc., etc.)

I saw something and I took action.

Three Take-Aways:

1
If you see potential harassment, speak up. A lot of trouble for everyone can be averted.

2
There’s a big difference between a one-time thoughtless lack of judgement and a predatory repeat offender. A man who responds appropriately to being spoken to privately may not express thanks, but he will be glad.

3
You don’t have to be the person’s boss if you know them. This is a good way to de-escalate a potentially volatile situation.

Back to the gay thing: As a gay man, I’ve learned to suppress my instinct to stare at or pay attention to men I’m attracted to in the workplace. This is so because a lot of straight men hate being hit on by gay guys. Straight men ought to suppress their attraction to women in the workplace, too. Gay men who hit on straight men risk getting their ass kicked. Maybe the workplace would be better if straight men faced the same risk?

Content May be King, but Data Is Power Behind the Throne

I have often heard that “content is king” when it comes to demand gen. Yes, content can drive people to your web. Yes, content can fill the lead funnel with the names of people1 who download content after filling out a form. But, content alone cannot and will not help you understand your install base and how to find others who want to buy your product/service. Only data can do that.

A lot of companies spend tremendous effort on creating content for blogs, white papers, and social media. I guess it makes sense. After all, lead scoring and customer profiling are hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it, no? While it’s true that sophisticated tracking programs2 can determine which content is performing well, much more important data is elsewhere. Every company in this millennium uses some form of CRM,3 but strangely most companies don’t seem to use their CRM data base to capture vital information, such as:

  • Why did we win?
  • Who did we compete against?
  • Which people within a customer performed various roles?
  • What other technology is part of the customers’ stacks?
  • How many customers do we have by industry?

One of the blind spots here is that the answers to these questions are known by some people. Certainly, eStaff level executives have a good feel for this. For everyone else in an organization, it’s usually buried in emails (unstructured) or known to different people scattered in the organization (fragmented). This important knowledge is just beyond the grasp of effective up-sell, cross-sell, customer references, and other campaigns.

The last question about customers by industry is highly significant. When a company starts to grow their customer base, one of the first questions new prospects typically ask is: How many customers do you have in my industry? In olden days (15 years ago), we called this our “quals” — our proof that we are qualified to work in your industry. I find it remarkable that 5 out of 5 start ups I worked at could not run a simple query in their CRM to determine precisely how many customers they had. This was so, in part, because it wasn’t always clear what was a customer. (I used the word “precise” because cross-referencing the account receivables data base with the CRM data base and tediously resolving the inconsistencies is less than precise.)

A great management consultant4used to say: “The truth is usually found in the middle.” To that end, my take is that you need both content and data. If you don’t have an organized and systematic way to obtain data, maybe some of the resources applied to content could be redeployed for data.

Notes:

1 It amazing to me that most companies have to learn the hard way that people are clever enough to put in bogus information and disposable emails to get content. Thus, putting content behind forms is not a foolproof way to capture leads. At one company, I was in charge of the lead routing table. The first 3 of 80+ “routing rules” disposed of bogus names such as Buggs Bunny and swear words (lol).

2 Those sophisticated tracking systems are not cheap. Many companies pay tens of thousands each month for search engine optimization, syndication of content, pay-per-click ads, and “pixel fire” unique browser surveillance. Even more companies layer on more surveillance when they do not get tangible results. Is there any end to this?

3 CRM stands for “customer relationship management” (such as MS Dynamics or Salesforce.com). Here’s another unpopular observation: It’s the customers who manage the relationships they have with companies and not vice-versa.

4 My blessed mother taught me that line about the truth being the in middle. It has been borne out countless times in my experience. She also said: “People like to shop, but they don’t like to be sold to.”

For further reading

A simple online search for “best practices customer profile” yielded hundreds of results. One of them provides a nice step-by-step process for using customer profiles for revenue: Five Steps to Creating an Effective Customer Profile for Lead Scoring Note: This resource is 7 years old. Further support for the notion that there is no excuse for modern start ups to trip and fall because of this.

Image courtesy of GIPHY