Who’s a good boy? Follow my ask of you in this blog, and I’ll give you a belly rub.
As we approach almost two years of working remotely, I want to remind readers that we need to respect each other’s time on calls.
Less is more when it comes to meetings. Go in, get what you need, and get out. Simple.
Too often our customers are subjected to what I call “shaggy dog” calls. If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s essentially something that goes on too long and is anti-climatic. You know you’ve delivered a shaggy dog story when you tell an anecdote, and then your audience says something like “and then you found ten bucks.”
Arguably the best 21 minutes of comedy in the last two decades is the Rick James episode of Chappelle’s Show. I’m not going to quote it here because this is a PG-13 blog, but it’s a masterpiece. If you haven’t watched it in a while, go and watch it again because it holds up well after all these years.
A year ago this month I was asked to make a video of a demo for a customer. It sounded easy. Flash forward a day and I still wasn’t happy with the product, but I had a deadline, so I handed it off to the customer.
Flash forward to June. I’m sitting in that customer’s offices with their new CEO and my Regional Vice President of sales. We didn’t have an agenda, but I’m asked to pull up the video. I warn the two of them that this was my first video so it’s rough, but we watch it together. We pause every minute or so and chat. It’s summer and it’s hot outside, but I’m hot under my collar having to hear my voice in front of others. The most sobering thing about being a sales engineer is having to hear your own voice. The meeting ends and self-critiques about my videos aside, it was positive. Two days later we landed the new logo customer, and they’re now off doing some really awesome things on Salesforce.
I learned a lot from the first vide, but now that I’ve done a baker’s dozen videos this year, I learned a few lessons that I want to share. Since Martin Scorsese is probably my favorite director, I’m going to reference him and his movies exclusively in this post.
A coworker is leaving my team today. I’m sad, but it’s a great opportunity for him and he’s going to be in the Salesforce ecosystem so we’ll definitely cross paths again. While we didn’t work on a lot of projects together, I couldn’t help but think of some words of wisdom he told me that I use all the time.
You know you’re in the Chicago suburbs when you’re at Jewel.
I don’t remember when I met Stoner Kelly. Jewel was full of colorful characters and I recall there were some silly nicknames, but nobody had a name like Stoner Kelly.
My first recollection of him was as I walked to the break room one day and saw this tall, hirsute, mouth breathing man, with large bags under his eyes, wearing a butcher’s apron and staring into space behind the meat counter. In other words, he looked stoned. All the time.
