5 Things I learned at Earth’s most customer-centric company

https://www.linkedin.com/in/locarnopan?trk=hp-identity-name

I first publish this note at my Linkedin. You could connect with me here.

About Me

I was born and raise in Taiwan. I see myself a Taiwanese inherited in Chinese culture and later experienced the Western culture. Majored neither in Business Administration nor computer science, Instead, I majored in Drama at the Taipei National University of the Arts, leading Arts School in Asia. For past nine years in the technology space, I have the privilege to work with many great talents and altogether drive go-to-market strategies for two cutting-edge technologies; Content Deliver Network and Cloud Computing before markets were fully aware of these two powerful platforms can transform their business.

Looking forward, I am exploring how the cutting-edge technologies can enable a better world and dedicating my time to building a scalable and sustainable business on the global level.

Why this Post?

I’m super grateful to be where I am today. It’s always a fun journey since Day 1 and it will always be the Day 1 for me going forward. In April 2016, This is my four years anniversary with the Earth’s most customer-centric company. Being vocally self-critical, I think it’s right timing to review what I have going through, what have achieved and what have built. And for whoever is reading this post, I would love to have your feedback and exchange ideas.

Disclaimer: This post is solely from my personal experience and observation and doesn’t represent my past and current employer

#1 Customer Obsession — Working backward from a customer

“customer obsession is not for our benefits; we must start from the customers.”

As a Business Development professional, we all know finding the value for the customer and reviewing with them, again and again, is critical step to the success. Sounds like a cliche but I think this is the universal truth. Having said that, the Value coming in many forms and evolving continuously. Every technology vendor would say they alway provide the best value to their customers. However, the fundamental difference here is “customer obsession”. We have a methodology called working backward. It is a process of fleshing out the concept and gaining clarity on what services we are going to provide to our customers. The questions could be as such: Who are the customers, what are the challenges, what are the benefits that customers get from our product? What is the customer experience will be? The more details we put in, the more value that we can create for our customers. I also believe this methodology helps a lot when selling something new to the market. Because customer can’t do benchmarking. To solve the problem, we can start from one universal value proposition — cost saving. Think about it, even fast forward ten years from now, a customer will not say: I love your products so that I can pay 20% premium price. The doctrines of Cheaper better and faster will never go wrong. Here is another example, unlike the traditional Enterprise vendor, the value is associated with the unit price. The more value we can identify, the higher unit price and total contract value that we can get from a customer. On the contrary, the Unit price of the cloud is fixed and going down periodically. That sets me in a totally different position in front of a customer. We can focus on building up true value proposition and not to worry about the quotation (Remember how much time we spend on quotation back and forth with deal desk and customers ?). In fact, one of my previous Manager gave me the KPI is how much saving I could create for my customers. This is truly a key differentiator!

#2 Storytelling — help customer to visualize where they are heading

“We need to help customers to visualize what they can do with the technologies.”

In many cases, the technology landscape in Asia is behind two years or so comparing with the mature markets like US & Europe. As one of the early member for Asia Pacific at the team, my official title is “Account Manager”, but what I do mostly is to evangelize what is the cloud computing and to share how other early adopters used technologies and the lessons they have learned. The goal is to design a Cloud Journey that fits organizations of all sizes to achieve their business goals and even better to release their potential without limitation. Putting the customer’s hat on, I am paying the money on so called the “Cloud Computing” each month, and it is so different from what I have built successfully for past 20 years on the “legacy system” but once called the “cutting-edge” technologies. I am so used to see and control my infrastructure. I know how to make the budget, control the security, manage the resources…etc. And, now, I have to let go all the control. What the hell? Apparently, this is more a psychological barrier. In this scenario, If we treat the customer by using traditional way. We’re NOT likely to close any deals. Instead, for the first step, we need to build up the trust. We need to help our customer to visualize what they can achieve with the technology in the long term. A good way to start is to tell a story, a story with “Vision” and “relevancy.” On the preparation stage, it is like Sales 101. We need to find out the following: What are customer’s core business, What are their business and technical challenges? What are their goals of the business? How they want to achieve them…etc. The goal is to provide “Solutions”. But we use the story to help them visualize what they can do. Not too complicated, we just need to explain where are we going (Vision) and how we get there (relevancy) by technologies. Then, we just need to hand holding customer’s hand and walk with them on this cloud journey.

#3 Starting small & Building things in scale

“ Agility is the key success factor to the business of all sizes.”

Before joining the company, I was used to issuing a USD Million dollar quotation with multiple years of the contract to the customer. Just like many of you do, the selling cycle could be very long. When I started my work here, the majority of my customers were JUST spending USD 10–500 per month. I felt that it was NOT cool to work on a customer who just spent USD 50+ a month. Then, I realized that we are playing a different game here. Customers can start to use one product (usually Simple storage service) with very minimum cost (USD 0.1 per GB storage per month back then) and start to enjoy the benefits of the Cloud. Once customers tried it, they know the value of the technologies and will put more workloads onto the platform. I always love to use this analogy at an early day for my first call with customers. Using our technologies is just like playing Lego. We provide customers different Lego, And customers can use them to shape and build their vision. Even if they want to pivot the business direction, they have the flexibility to change it quickly. For me, the Cloud journey is a continuous process of try and error and learning. It starts slowly but would accelerate time over time. Once we open the throttle, we will realize this is an unstoppable trend.

#4 Be Bold to think Big and invest on “Unknown.”

“ A Single idea from the human mind can build cities.”

This is the script lines from Christopher Nolan’s movie, Inception. Never underestimated the power of one single thought, it may become the next big thing. Looked back my career, I always want to do things that others don’t want to do. Starting my career here as an Inside sales, instead of thinking myself just a sales doing small deals, while other field sales focused on lower hanging fruit, I position myself to concentrate on building “other” and long-term revenue stream for the team. My definition of Think Big is not just to do my number in hundred times of scale, but to invest on unknown. Investing on one simple idea that could potentially lead me to the blue sea. And the key is to do various of experiments. If I see an opportunity with a 40% of successful rate, I would put the resource and just give it a try. However, the challenge part is not to give it a try. It is to know what NOT to try! The answer to this question is simple : to identify the fundamental truth of how we do business. I love to use Elon Musk’s quote; To boil things down to the fundamental truth and reason up from there. In my learning experience, it is volume & computing power. Remember, the unit price for the cloud is fixed, transparent and lower over a period of the time. I need to know which customer has volume and will consume more computing power. In this scenario, I selected Media and eCommerce were my key focus. I was leading the team to drive go-to-market strategies and responsible for day to day execution. That’s also why I never select customer because they have the brand name. I select the customer by using my criteria.

#5 Create an ecosystem that works

“Building ecosystem is extremely hard, but the reward is huge.”

I would say my biggest learning here is to aware the importance of building a robust ecosystem. And luckily, I have the chance to work with best talents in the market to make it happens. The goal of creating a strong ecosystem is to scale the business with limited resources. The challenge that we all have in every organization. My definition of the ecosystem can categorize into two parts: Community and Channel partner systems. Both are important to capture the short and mid-to-long term business opportunities. At early days, we found the challenge to sell the Cloud was once we convinced the business owner to give it a shot, but very few of talents in the markets can do the implementation. The solution is to find other early adopters from the community and pass the opportunity to them or even better to recruit them. I also learn that community is a great place to collect feedback. Any feedback on products, services, uses cases, …etc. The feedback can save us tons of time on building the right product and business model to serve the customers better. Over the time, I am so happy to see our User group in Taiwan is running bigger than ever. It is always amazing to read the high quality of discussion among the users. 
To find a trusted channel partner is challenging. It is a journey of trial and error. Unlike other vendors, 30% or 40% of margin can be easily passed to the partner, our margin to the partner is relatively slim. In this case, I am trying hard to find partners who see the value of the cloud, who is willing to invest in the future, and who is prepared to take the risk and build up the long term business model for themselves and the customers. The key learning is to identify the strength of each partner and help them to design a business model that is fit for themselves and our customers. I have seen more and more partners who succeed in the business. The reason for why they are making the way up is the willingness to transform themselves. It seems no other ways.

Investing the unknown & Taking risks. I only live once.

This is how I am telling myself these days. Looking back my four years, there are indeed more learning, but I only summarize five of them. Appreciated for all of my colleagues, friends and customers who are walking with me through this Cloud Journey. And, I am expecting to learn more here.

Again, I would love to have your feedback and exchange experience on how we can use cutting-edge technologies to enable a better world. I am an idealist, maybe. In near future, we might be working together!

P.S.: It is not always easy to write the article in a constructed manner for a non-native English speaker who has zero training in writing. Having said that, it is a good practice for myself and I would love to do more.

You can connect me here or send me the email: locarno.pan@gmail.com