“So is this for BDRs who can’t reach registrants who didn’t attend?  Or for SRs who can’t reach attendees who did attend?”

It’s complicated.

I’ve never worked at a startup before, but I think this is the beginning of a phase where we are scaling some things and noticing how that breaks other things.  It’s like when you are 12 and your legs grow but the rest of you hasn’t caught up yet.

I saw three examples of that in the past few days.

1. Our followup email templates

When I was hired, a Director of Demand Generation was also hired.  She’s taken our programs by storm!  One of her first achievements was to execute a successful webinar series starting this month.

The quote at the beginning of this post is from an email I wrote to our marketing team – I was providing text for a “standard” email, and I didn’t know if the text was for people who registered and didn’t attend, or who actually did attend.

This is going to be second nature in a few months.  In a few months, we’ll have a template, a system, an agreed-upon way of following up with customers after webcasts.  But for now we’re in “let’s have some great webcasts and experiment with what works best for people and process around followup.”

2. Our website

We’re in the middle of some updates for our website. We’re doing some short term triage with a plan for a more thorough overhaul later this summer.  I’ve only been on the periphery of the mechanics of the update (with the exception of the actual content) but from what I can tell, there’s a current platform, a staging area, and integration with Hubspot, our marketing automation platform.  When a new page needs to be set up, there’s a lot of different places it can go and people who may need to be involved to get it done.

Complex.

This, too, will simplify itself.  We’ll have a single platform with automation and a clear idea of where landing pages go.  But for now, we’re still figuring that out.

3. Demo lab equipment

I gave my first demo this week on a webinar.  I also gave my second demo this week, that one for an analyst.  But when I went to get the IP and login to the system, Matt and I determined that the system wasn’t working.  And in fact, it took Matt a good day to get our double-nested ESX environment with workload generation back up and running.

It turns out that someone else thought they were using that equipment for a set of storage lab tests that we need to do.  And then someone else needed the same equipment for some application performance testing.  We’re big enough that there’s not one person who knows all the testing we’re doing any more.

So I was directed to our “longevity” installation – where we run our product for a long, long time as a casual part of our QA process.  Except that version of the software isn’t running the current version, it’s running a future version.

So for next week, I’ll be demoing on our support cluster.  Unless someone else needs that for something.  🙂

It’s complicated.

It wasn’t, now it is, then it won’t be again.  Then, I’m going to guess, eventually, it will be again.