Technology Tools in the HR Space : Dane Gibson
The company I chose to interview is located in Vancouver, British Columbia; Logan chose to leave his company name anonymous. They are a Market Leader in the People Analytics space with a goal to help HR managers become more strategic and excel within their business.
Prior to joining this company Logan worked in the Business Intelligence and Enterprise Analytics space for 3 years where he had the opportunity to work as a Customer Success Manager, as well as a Business and Senior Consultant around the world including countries such as Australia, Germany, England and Morocco.
TECHNOLOGICAL TOOLS USED ON A DAILY BASIS
Slack (Communication):
Slack is a real time communication tool that makes organizations solve problems on the fly.
Before slack, people would use to communicate in person, or via skype. The challenge with this is there was no way to streamline a specific problem via a workflow to a larger audience of experts without having to setup a meeting with multiple stakeholders.
Not only would this take up tons of time, trying to balance everyone’s schedule, but it also costs the organizations thousands of dollars in opportunity cost. Using slack, you can pinpoint the individual who knows the solution, in a matter of minutes, without disturbing other people in the organization.
Slack allows one to use channels to troubleshoot issues very quickly. For example, helping keep track of specific customers. All the relevant internal stakeholders communicate within a channel to expedite the time to solution. Whether it is communicating with a sales team on new competitive analysis content in the market, speaking with a manager about high priority tasks, or working with a technical counterpart to understand the complexities of specific technology, Slack is an everyday tool for one working in the business world.
One of the best impacts slack has on a company is that the whole organization has adopted a perspective of real time problem solving in addition to the fact that it integrates with so many other best in suite applications.
Zoom (Meetings):
Zoom is a company that has recently outpaced the old technology of skype. No more static customer conference calls, Zoom is the gold standard of hosting remote meetings and allows organizations to run a remote work culture. Zoom is used both internally and externally, as well as to host webinars for product presentations and demonstrations.
Google Suite (Mail, Sheets, Docs):
G suite gives one the ability to share and collaborate on presentations, spreadsheets and word documents, helping make business much more efficient. The smooth integrations between calendar and mail allow to create meetings on the fly in the business space. G suite’s biggest competitor is Microsoft Office 365.
Salesforce (Customer Relationship Management):
Salesforce is a very well-known product in the technology space that allows salespeople to record, track, and analyze their sales activity. It also provides embedded analytics, and custom workflows to trigger financial processes such as invoicing, and tenant off boarding notifications.
Logan uses Salesforce to track financial forecasts, understand pipeline activity, record prospect information and analyze marketing trends. In addition, Salesforce allows Logan to track current customer information such as tenant codes, contacts and renewal dates.
Gainsight (Customer Management):
Gainsight is a Customer Success tool, which has been funded by the CEO of Salesforce. This tool integrates perfectly with Salesforce and is used for Customer Success professionals to manage customers. Everything from Account Statuses, to meeting notes, and tasks are held in this tool. Logan uses this to track customer activity and understand which accounts have a renewal in the current and next quarter.
Splunk (Customer and System Usage Analytics):
Splunk is a tool that allows companies to analyze all of the various development systems in place in a nice and clear way. A specific reason to use this technological tool would be to monitor customer usage such as daily logins and activity.
Outreach (Sales Email Messaging / Tracking Software):
Outreach is a tool that integrates with Salesforce and Gmail to help salespeople manage communication with their prospects. One could use this tool to monitor sales activity when building email sequences. Ultimately this helps understand what the email open rates and click rates are with a given campaign.
Loopio (Request for Proposal Software):
Loopio is designed to help sales and presales professionals complete RFI (Request for Information) documents during the sales cycle by housing a vast amount of re-occurring questions that prospects typically ask when assessing a new vendor. Logan would use this tool to support sales in completing RFI’s for current trial customer prospects to provide specific information about his company.
TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION
The interesting part about all these tools is how they integrate. In today’s age, software is solving more and more specific problems, which means with the hyper saturation in the SaaS world, products need to speak to one another via API, to provide immediate value to its users and streamline processes.
Some integrations that I narrowed my research to after interviewing with Logan are the following:
Outreach and Google Mail: This allows you to send emails and track when and if the recipient opened the email, to schedule emails at a specific time and set reminders to follow up. In all of this, Outreach provides analytics to understand open rates for specific campaigns.
Zoom and Google Calendar: Allows one to send calendar invites with a zoom invite making it super easy to hop on internal or customer calls.
Salesforce and Gainsight: Allows one to run their account management processes in Gainsight, by pulling all the Salesforce data. Two examples of this, one is understanding when a renewal date is for customers in Gainsight, by pulling account information from Salesforce. Another example is if one is analyzing a specific opportunity, you can tell what marketing content a customer has opened in the past.
4 WAYS TO KEEP TECHNOLOGY SKILLS CURRENT
1. Events: Attending events to meet new people and discuss best practices around specific tools.
2. Networking internally and externally: Networking with experts across the entire organization of a company across many different fields as well as outside of a company help to keep a solid network.
3. Research: Research online on upcoming technologies and subscribe to specific blogs such as SaaStr, Gainsight and Outreach.
4. Learn by doing: The best way to do anything is to learn, fail fast and continue to learn. It’s always fun to get your hands dirty with new technologies.
TECH PROJECTS LOGAN HAS BEEN WORKING ON IN HIS SPARE TIME
Logan has recently launched a company with a business partner, he also decided to keep this company name anonymous but it is an e-learning platform that helps people develop and improve in their life.
Currently they are only offering one online course which focuses on creating goals and using systems to keep one accountable. In future, he plans on partnering with experts in their field to promote new course content for his community. In this partnership he focuses on social media marketing, and partnerships.
The CEO of this company also owns an very successful app . It is one of the market leaders in personal analytics and habit tracking with a 4.8/5 rating. Logan and his partner created this as an umbrella company to support people beyond the tracking of their goals but also with the infrastructure to understand, create and map a continual plan for their life.
ONLINE RESOURCES/WHAT THEY ARE USED FOR
SaaStr.com: General SaaS organizational strategies, and analytics around churn, retention and customer satisfaction.
HubSpot: Demand generation and targeting best practices as well as messaging to prospects.
Gainsight: Customer Success Best practices around how to create a CS organizational charter, and how to reduce churn.
Outreach: Lead generation and sales conversion strategies as well as sales sequences
WHAT DOES THIS COMPANY DO TO STAY IN THE EDGE OF INNOVATION
Logan’s company continues to invest in development to create technology that allows them to scale across multiple domains.
His team has built the entire business with a given technology that supports enterprise customers. As of late they have utilized the platform to serve smaller segmented customers.
Secondly, they developed data automation mechanisms to load customer data in the smaller segments in less than 2 minutes. This technology is saving hours and hours of manual work for their enterprise segment and has also supported them in partnering with other companies to embed their analytic technologies into their current systems. Some of this development was done through API and some with custom code.
Another area where they stay in the cutting edge, is their ability to surface existing products for their internal teams. For example, the Chief People Officer uses a people analytics platform to present important turnover and retention trends at monthly all hands meetings.
In conclusion this interview has helped me grasp a better understanding of technology tools used on a daily basis, because Logan preferred to keep our interview anonymous I shifted my overview thoughts from this interview towards specific tools that benefit one in the technology world. Its easy to see that technology has sped up our way of life, we create and develop in order to better our lives.
References
Slack logo image: Retrieved from https://slack.com/intl/en-ca/features
Zoom logo image: Retrieved from https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=us.zoom.videomeetings&hl=en_US
Salesforce logo image: Retrieved from https://www.softwareadvice.com/crm/salesforce-profile/
