Intermission!

Apologies for the blog silence, guys -- we've had a few recent changes at SalesLoft that you may have heard about (yay, funding!).

That has been awesome (literally, awesome. As in, actually inspiring awe), but has also made for some late nights, so I'm just now getting back to a semblance of spare time. I have several blog topics that have been jockeying for space in my head, though, and I promise those are coming soon. 

If you're interested in more info on SalesLoft, check out this masterpiece of humbleness and transparency on the funding details from our CEO, Kyle Porter.

In the meantime, here is a GIF of a herd of Corgi puppies. Because, why not?

Lifetime Value(s)

Most of you have probably heard of the business metric "Customer Lifetime Value." (If you haven't and you're still reading my blog, then you're probably my mother. Hi, Mom!) Essentially it's the projected worth of your customers during their time with your company. It's meant to make people take a long-term assessment of a customer, rather than just the revenue he or she is paying right now.  

Fireside Chat with Charles Brewer, founder of Mindspring, and the incomparable Sanjay Parekh at the Atlanta Center for Civic Innovation on March 2, 2015 | Photo: Mike Whitacre

I was thinking about this metric the other night at "Fireside Chat with Charles Brewer," an event hosted by the Center for Civic Innovation in downtown Atlanta. Charles is best known as the founder of MindSpring and the creator of a set of Core Values and Beliefs held in almost fanatical reverence by MindSpring employees and entrepreneurs alike. (He also founded a town in Costa Rica, but that's a whole other discussion.)

MindSpring was founded in 1994 and merged with EarthLink in 2000, so everything Charles did with the company happened 20 years ago at this point. 

And yet, on Monday night when Charles was to speak, multiple former MindSpring employees, investors and partners showed up to see him. And every single one spoke up about how the core values changed their lives. 

Let me repeat that -- changed their lives. They didn't say they liked them, or thought they sounded good, or were generally helpful. They said those core values impacted everything they did after MindSpring. 

That's some pretty compelling stuff. 

It made me start thinking about SalesLoft and our core values (positive, supportive & self-starting). Right now, we're a startup with a small team. We try to embody our values every day, and we've all found ourselves applying them in our personal lives. They are the basis for how we run our business, how we work as a team and how we interact with clients. They are the backbone of our company. 

But what if they could be even more? What if they could also change our lives to the point that we are just as passionate about them in two decades as we are now? What if they are so powerful that they impact everything we do after SalesLoft? What would that look like?

I think it would look a lot like Charles Brewer and MindSpring.

Want to read all of Charles Brewer's core values and beliefs, as outlined by Brewer himself in an inspiring 2001 speech to Southern Institute? Check out Lance Weatherby's post, "Leading with Values."

When you hear Charles explain his core values and beliefs and where they came from, you get it. You understand why people reacted so strongly to them, and why the creation of those values influenced his employees' lives. At an event some of this is, of course, Charles himself and how brilliantly he engages the audience, but the values hold up on paper as well. They stand alone and are self-motivating.  

The values seem simple enough when just listed out, yet somehow most companies never find their way to them. I can personally attest that it's a lot easier to talk about your core values than it is to follow them, but I can also attest that it's worth it.  

Following strong core values and beliefs has a wide impact, from business to family to faith. Applying that level of accountability to an entire company can mean great things, both for the employees and the customers. It can, as Charles has shown, grow exponentially beyond where it started and affect your life years down the road. So that leads me to ask:

What is the lifetime value of the right core values?

Based on the compelling story of MindSpring, I'd say it's pretty damn high. 

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Excerpt from Charles' explanation of where his core values came from:

"The values exist for me because… well, you know, they came out of experience. I think most people, almost all people, want to do something great with part of their life, they want to contribute something significant, they want to get satisfaction from it, they’re willing to make sacrifices and work hard to make that happen. But I also think that, for most people, it doesn’t happen. And it’s something about the way things happen inside of an organization that keep it from happening. Something insidious, something not on purpose, but the status quo is not that encouraging, and many, many, people eventually give up on getting satisfaction from the work part of their life. They spend at least half their waking hours working, but they give up! They get the satisfaction from family, hobbies, or something else. That’s a pretty big tragedy.

So when I saw some of that happening around me in my early work experiences, I was thinking, how to avoid that? You’re going to have a company, how do you make it different from the rather depressing status quo? And I don’t think it can be just picking some special, magical people because I don’t think the people are the problem to begin with. It's not a special, magical line of business or anything else, and really the only candidate left after you go through all of the things it couldn’t be was the philosophy, the values, the intent of how people in the company are going to work together and interact with each other and with the customers and the world at large. And so the particular values we had at MindSpring got carried on to our subsequent companies and on to Las Catalinas, my current venture, which is a town-building exercise in Costa Rica.

They came functionally from the three things I think are most important. One is respect for the individual — I believe that if you treat people with respect and give them responsibility, that’s the way to get the best results. Not everybody agrees with that, some people think you have to micromanage your way to the best results, but that’s number one. Number two is honesty and integrity. Number three is making commitments with care and living up to them. And when you look at when things are going wrong in an organization, and people are not able to attain the results and satisfaction they’re looking for, if you keep looking deep enough, I think you will probably find some lack of honesty where employees are not telling each other the truth, not telling their boss the truth, their bosses aren’t telling the employees the truth, the company’s not telling the customers the truth, and it just builds on itself. And it becomes inevitably a poisonous thing.

Some of the other values are just more quirky, individual things. One of the core values is frugality. I'm frugal, I can't help it. Some companies compete with big, flashy style, but that’s just not me, so that’s going to be on my list for core values and beliefs. 

Work is an important part of life and and should be fun. Being a good businessperson does not mean being stuffy and boring. And that was a very visible one at MindSpring. We ended up attracting a visibly quirky collection of people working there. A lot of times they were people who just didn’t fit in at other organizations because they just couldn’t be them! They could come to MindSpring and it was okay to be them. Anything was okay, as long as it was consistent with our core values.

And those people who fit in the least well in the normal corporate environment oftentimes turned out to be the people who were the absolute best, most enthusiastic, most effective leaders at MindSpring because, for once in their lives, they found a place where they could be themselves and it was okay."

EVENTful | Atlanta Startup Village

If you've never been to Atlanta Startup Village, you're missing out. 

On the third Monday of every month (generally), hundreds of startup aficionados, entrepreneurs and generally motivated Atlantans come together over free beer to watch five companies pitch for five minutes each. 

Inspired by Brad Feld's Startup Community Revolution (and, by extension, the TechStars program), the Atlanta Startup Community's self-described goal in 2012 was to follow that path "to make Atlanta’s startup community thrive." 

Well, today it's doing that and more. In max-capacity crowds of 600-700 attendees in the Atlanta Tech Village event space, people jostle for standing room only for up to an hour before presentations, drawn in by the promise of discovering the next big investment, finding the next perfect company role, or locating the next awesome job candidate.

It's totally worth it. The energy in that room is palpable, especially with Rivalry CEO Jon Birdsong hosting. When the pitches start, the entire room comes to a halt and stands in mesmerized silence. And then there's five minutes of questions. Really hard questions. I'd venture to say that if you make it through this room, you probably have a viable product.

Last night, I watched five kick-ass companies do their level best to capture the room's attention. Here's the rundown:

• PartPic | Visual Search for Replacement Parts: You take a picture of a part, and it matches it up in the database. No more, "I need this little bendy thing that's shaped like an 'E' without the middle bar, with two prongs at this end, and a hole here..." I thought it sounded great but was unsure if it would work, but then they did a live demo on a strange little screw. And when it actually worked, found the part and popped up the specs and manufacturer, the whole room broke into spontaneous applause and whistles. I was sold! (Find them on Twitter)

• ParkENT Cycles | Secure Bicycle Parking Space (Faster than walking, cheaper than parking): How can you not love a company whose slogan is, "We just want to 'hug' your bicycle and keep it safe"? Aw, guys, my bike wants a hug too! Okay but seriously, this clever company lets you lock and unlock your bike from their patented rack system, just by using your smartphone. No more stolen bikes or awkward bike locks. With ATL traffic what it is, and Marta stations spaced as far apart as they are, this idea captured a good portion of the room, and I heard at least one person say he'd finally buy a bike if this system went in across the city. (Find them on Twitter)

• FogOptics | Fog Problems Solved -- Reliable Free Space Optics: So ... it took me a few minutes to get this, I'm not going to lie. I can't even adequately recount it to you, so I'm going to borrow a line from a Hypepotamus article by Carey Tucker instead: "Their flagship product, Fog Laser™, is the world’s only communication laser platform to deliver fiber-like reliability in adverse weather like fog, smog, clouds, smoke, snow, & scintillation." If this still does not make sense to you, you are not alone -- attendee @tonamok tweeted, "Hate to say that I couldn’t figure out what his product was supposed to do 4 minutes into a 5 minute presentation." Toward the end, though, it got a little clearer -- basically, the laser works even in bad weather, which equals better bandwidth without wires. (They had no social media that I could find, so ... not sure what to say about that. Maybe brilliant laser optic things don't need Twitter?)

• Carematics | Cloud-Based Healthcare Transition Management System (Better coordination, better outcomes): This system automates the hospital discharge process, improves tracking and provides insight into post-care, thereby also reducing readmission. While the demo made it look seamless, some in the audience were dubious of the reality being quite that smooth, but I have to say Carematics made a pretty good case. It seemed like an interesting solution to a growing problem, so I hope it's as good as it looks. (Find them on Twitter)

• Guild Quality | Customer Satisfaction Surveys for Contractors: Based on Guild Quality's reported metrics last night (nearly 2,000 clients monthly!), this was a big need in the market. Kind of a Yelp for home improvement, they provide the visibility, feedback, analytics and more to the building industry. If I have to hire a contractor, the fact that they use Guild Quality would definitely drive me to select them because it would mean that they listen and integrate feedback (and you know how that makes me happy). (Find them on Twitter)

As always, a solid showing! If you missed this time around, not to worry: ATVillager Friendly Human got it all on camera in a live stream, you can check it out here. 

Finding Your Digital Voice

Can you tell the difference between these four statements?

Yeah, exactly. Neither can I.

We might be intending to convey any of these: 

But how can you tell? More importantly, how can your audience tell?

Communicating through text alone, you lose those subtle audio-visual cues that you take for granted and subconsciously process during in-person interactions. This causes misinterpretation, aggravation and plain old confusion as everyone projects their own biases and assumptions on the digital conversation.

It's a little bit like learning to read the formal version of another language, and then trying to have a chat with a native speaker. Your words themselves may be correct, but there's going to be some cultural miscues, unintentionally offensive phrases and general bewilderment over colloquialisms. ("Bless your heart" is, um, a lot less nice than it sounds.)

This is why emoticons were invented --  to help people bridge the gap between cold, clinical type and warm, fuzzy emotions. (Think something will be taken the wrong way? No worries, put a smiley face after it to ensure the recipient knows it was a joke!) And as text messages became more popular but remained laborious to construct, and social media allowed fewer and fewer characters, and our attention spans got shorter,  people wanted an even quicker way to get the point across. Thus were born emojis. (I'm not going to get into those now, but let's just say that, as a former copy editor, they're not my most favorite thing in the world ... sorry, Katie!)

But I digress.

This divergence between what you are trying to convey and what your recipient actually comprehends is one of the single biggest sources of confusion in communicating online, and one of the hardest parts about my job. Minus a broad spectrum of emoticon and emoji offerings in your standard support desk software (that's a joke, I'm totally not advocating that), what's a client success manager -- or anyone who interacts primarily online -- to do?

It's all about finding your "digital voice." First you have to define what you want your voice to be, and then you have to learn how to express it.

When I'm working on our support desk, my digital voice is meant to be friendly, approachable, helpful and reassuring. I want people who talk to me to be comforted and feel like they're in competent hands, even when I may not have an instant solution. I want them to trust that I will either have the answer, or I will find it. (Please note here that it isn't always, unfortunately, the answer the client wants, so then there's a whole new dimension of letting people down gently and offering acceptable alternatives.)

This can be a lot harder than you anticipate. It takes a lot of practice, and not getting defensive when something that you think makes perfect sense turns out to be, in fact, entirely incomprehensible. (I work for a SaaS company. This part is really hard.) You have to learn how to adjust appropriately to your audience's demographics, and integrate feedback into future communications.

It also can require a bit of exaggeration. I often compare my support digital voice to wearing stage makeup. It might be over the top if we were talking in person, but you actually need the extra oomph to correctly reach across the distance. I'm not saying end every sentence with a smiley face (though used judiciously, those can work well), but rather be cognizant of things like how abrupt a really short sentence can sound, and pad in a few extra kind words to soften it up. 

You know how you respond to a friend or partner (or your mom...) asking for feedback on a somewhat iffy dish they've cooked? It's kind of like that.

You can also use formatting like bold and italics, of course, but since those don't always translate across platforms, I try to ensure the wording itself can stand alone.

Here are some variations of the relatively ambiguous "No!" in the first graphic: 

Or you could always go around the word "No" altogether, with something like, "I'd love to help you with this, but unfortunately we can't ______. However, we can offer _____."

Now obviously, these are mostly specific to my job, but they're a good place to start thinking about how you sound to others. In many situations, this is going to be important. You don't have to be on the support desk to want to communicate effectively with your clients, coworkers or even your friends.

A good rule of thumb for me is if you think something might sound rude, then it probably does. It's worth taking an extra moment or two to rephrase something at this step; it'll likely take even more time to fix a miscommunication later. And as my mother always says, good manners cost you nothing! 

How do you ensure your audience is getting the right message? Have you found your digital voice?