Aligning Business and People Strategy - A Conversation with Laurent Pierre Jr.

Speaker A: This is leadership beyond your community of conversation.

Speaker B: But this is the first time in my professional career that everybody, 100% of us are consciously aware we are engaged in the change initiative.

Speaker A: Yeah, everything, I mean Covid caused us all to go through change right at the same time. But our experiences were so different.

Speaker B: Facing these unprecedented times in isolation and is pure insanity. Joining us today is Laurent Pierre Jr. Laurent is a visionary tech leader and currently senior Vice president of Global customer support at Precisely. With a career spanning key roles at IBM, Microsoft, Wolters, Kluwer and Nielsen iq. He has led large scale digital transformation initiatives across global enterprises. Laurent is passionate about harnessing AI, uh, cloud technologies and data driven strategies to elevate customer experience and operational efficiency. He's known for his people first leadership style and Laurent builds high performing teams that thrive on innovation, empathy and continuous improvement. His work sits at the intersection of technology and human impact, driving change that's both scalable and meaningful.

Speaker A: What I really loved about our conversation with Laurent one is just his energy and his passion. And of course we're kindred spirits I think because we see things very similarly in terms of people strategy aligning to business strategy and technology. But the way that Laurent wove in examples and use cases to underscore the pain points that he's experienced and the way that they have worked through those things, I think that's made for a great conversation.

Speaker B: What I really like the same as you is just the way he shows up so warm, enthusiastic, inviting and caring. And his superpower, even when it comes to people is still process. Because a lot of times we have the intention and we really do care about the people and we really want to take it into but we don't have a process to make that happen beyond our one to ones. And uh, just the, the process is, enables us to bring our best forward and it isn't just technology process, its people process as well. Welcome Laurent.

Speaker A: Uh, Laurent Pierre, thank you so much for joining our episode today. We are so excited to talk to you and we're really excited to bring your expertise to our audience. I think you know, as we were talking in the pre show, we've got a lot of similarities, different paths, but both you and I have been in our careers focused on this juggle between technology and. Well, there's also people, Right, right. We understand the tech and we're the ones representing that we still have people at the companies as well. And so I'm excited to dig in because there's just going to be so much synergy I think we're going to be maybe a little all over the place, but that's, you know, that's kind of how we roll. If you've listened to our show before, the idea is, you know, so just see where we go. But our focus today is really talking about that technology within business and people strategy and how people strategy actually supports our technologies to drive our business results. And we can't forget that key component. So as we get started, if you would just give us a little bit of history on um, kind of how you got to where you are today and what precisely is about and what you're doing there.

Speaker C: Absolutely. So uh, thanks again for having me folks. I'm really uh, happy it's my fun topic. Uh, and it's good to uh, be with you guys today. So for me, I've been in technology for close to approaching, I'm going to date myself, three decades. Right? And uh, I started out, believe it or not, my first role out of undergrad was a consultant on Capitol Hill for a constituent correspondence management software company. Uh, at the time that we were responsible for, and I think our competition back then was with eds and we were responsible for all of the letters that you get from your senators or congressmen. And we helped with campaigns and we helped with uh, uh, issues that are, that are important to constituents. And back then we uh, were doing AI manually in the sense where customers, not uh, customers but constituents, would call in to their congressmen or senators and, and voice their concerns on issues. And our software had the ability to tag those conversations, tag those inbound emails, and then generate those letters of support or position statements to those specific customers based on the feedback that we had. And so that was kind of our first uh, uh, foray into uh, being able to target customers or constituents based on what they had. And so from that I spent uh, a lot of time with customers, either as a consultant or on site, uh, and, and working with technology. And, and the uh, common thread between there is as, as I remember an, an old mentor of mine, he was in sales. He said, regardless of the software, regardless of how cool, how many cool features you're putting in, we are in a people business. And he said, he said to me very plainly, one thing you learn, I know this is your first job out of school, but one thing you have to learn is how to work with people, how to understand their needs. And he said, you know, the reason why the senators buy software for me is because they trust me. They trust me first. And even if the software has a bug or they run into an issue, they trust that I'm going to take care of it for them. And that stuck with me 30 years later right in my career because that's what I've been building along the way. Um, is, is making sure that I don't leave the people component behind as much as I geek out around the tech. Uh, that's uh, that's new and coming around.

Speaker A: And so is there a particular moment? Oh sorry, no, no.

Speaker C: And, and I was gonna say. So fast forward to where we are here precisely. Data Integrity Co. Uh, we have our AI strategy that we just uh, had some, some great press uh, about over on LinkedIn and a lot of social media and whatnot. And we are, we are pretty much that company, the company that out of 90 out of 100 Fortune 5, 100 Fortune 100 companies, 95 of them have our software. And we're talking things around uh, um, data integrity, location, uh, intelligence, uh, as well as data enrichment. And so in all that we're talking about, especially the hot topic of AI, the foundation of that is data. And so a lot of people ah, wanting to deploy AI solutions, agentic AI services and whatnot. But if your data is not good and your data is not clean, you're going to have a really bad experience both from a hallucination perspective, from a right solution to the customer perspective. And so our company works with a lot of companies, close to 12,000 companies around the world, uh, around making sure that their data can be trusted, that their data is accurate, that their data is governed properly and it's managed. And so think about um, companies who need uh, to get it packaged to the right place on the 10th floor of cubicle 1ac or whatnot. That's the level of granularity that our software is able to go to. And part of our location intelligence solutions that we have, um, and if you take a look at uh, some of the other uh, aspects of um, you know, either delivery routing or companies uh, like Doordash for example use our software as well. It's really important that our data is right so that things are getting delivered to the right place. Right. As opposed a house address with a specific location or an apartment building, um, with a specific location so people don't end up in the middle of a tarmac or uh, in a cornfield somewhere. And so those are some examples of what we do. Uh, but I'm super excited. I'm going to celebrate a year next month here at Precisely and what I do. And so we're doing a lot of things around technology, people and process. And hopefully we'll get into some of that, uh, in the next, uh, 20 minutes or so.

Speaker B: Well, you just said technology, people and process. So we're very interested in people strategy. And something came to mind as you talked about the data, especially because the word customer is in your title, which is a customer is always a person. And we can use technology to support and certainly do, and it's a good idea. So the question is, and also you're global, yet every challenge is a local challenge. So how do you build bridges between the data, precision, precisely, if we may say, and the need of a customer?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think the biggest thing that we look at when we're diving into a solution for a customer is what is it that they're trying to achieve and what are the problems that they have? First of all, um, sometimes, uh, it's not necessarily just, uh, a data problem. It's also a business problem that you're trying to solve. And oftentimes people want to throw technology at something that is getting the different functions in a room and identifying what is it that we're trying to solve in the first place. And so I can't tell you the number of times where customers have purchased technology without a use case, without a plan, without a problem to solve. But it's that, uh, it had the words AI or it had some cool feature of the day, and six months later they're staring at the software. Right. Or even worse, they've implemented a new workflow or a new technology, a new automation, and the problem still wasn't solved because the use case wasn't applied. Right. And, and so when you take a look at this, it's often that, uh, when you have companies with different silos and different departments and different regional businesses, they're not talking to each other. And oftentimes we become that bridge and between those organizations because we, we're probing and asking those questions. What are your operations in Poland look like? Oh, well, we haven't spoken to them. And what are your operations in South America? Uh, well, they work separately, but. Except the problem that you're trying to solve is multifaceted, multilayered, regional in nature in some cases, but also global. And so something that you fix at corporate headquarters is going to need to apply across the board, otherwise you're going to continue to enhance the silos that are causing the inefficiencies in the first place. And one of the things I've seen since I've been at precisely is that the approach that we take is identifying first what is the business problem that you're trying to solve, what are the technology solutions that you need? And have you looked at the people and the processes in between it? And oftentimes we find that no one's looked at the process because, hey Laurent, we've looked at it for, we've had this process for 20 years. Except the technology you're applying is still not going to fix the business process problem that you have. And that's why they kind of work together. So hopefully that kind of gives you an idea of the approach that we take as you're trying to solution, uh, for our customers at a global scale, if you will.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. The three people, process and technology is all, they're always intertwined. Right. Like they cannot be separated. And, and other than perhaps from the investigation perspective, that discovery perspective. Right, but, but when you're bringing in a technology and not changing the process, well, that technology has affected your process or you're changing people, your people have affected that process.

Speaker C: That's exactly.

Speaker A: Even manual processes, you change the people.

Speaker C: That's right.

Speaker A: It has changed your process. Right. Because it's different people.

Speaker C: That's exactly right.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So how. So you make sure that you're looking at all three of those, but then also looking at it from within. It's like within business departments we'll say, right, business functions, but then also across all of those. And what are some strategies that you have to, to keep that, that people piece in line? Because I know that, you know, working, um, on my own change management projects where we've had hundreds of people looking at process and technology and in comparison like five of us looking at the people.

Speaker C: Absolutely.

Speaker A: M. It's definitely not balanced.

Speaker C: No, no, I completely agree. It's, it's so interesting because, um, I've worked, I've worked at a variety of places in different functions, so accounting, um, industry, Microsoft, IBM, etc. And we've helped companies in different industries as well. One of the things that I found is that people often find that uh, you have people who have been in the company for 10, 15, 20, 30 years, except their skills may not have evolved with where you're trying to get to. And so all of a sudden you start architecting, uh, a solution to a problem, but then you realize that after you've architected the solution, the people that are in place, that have been in place, that have been holding steady, the old way of doing things are unable to adapt to the new way or worst case scenario, they're putting blockers in place to keep the old guard in place. And so um, we ran into some of that when we were imagine at IBM. We were taking out uh, the 1960s mainframe, replacing it with Salesforce, putting Watson on top of it, uh, pulling the engine from healthcare and putting into support and then getting an entire organization to uh, to move away from the mainframe into this. What we found were people who are like hey, Salesforce can't do all these custom things that we did over the last 50 years. Right. But the issue, it wasn't that new tech. It was that people did not want to adopt it. People wanted to stay in their old ways. And so the skill uh, up, uh, the upskilling that we needed to do wasn't there. The um, shift from the old process to the new. Also people thought we're going to just lift and shift it into Salesforce. Except that's not how Salesforce works for anyone who's worked. And then from a technology perspective we earlier uh, in our pre call, uh, Tom, you mentioned Salesforce, right. Salesforce is great but, and you can do anything with it. But that's exactly the other side of it. The fact that it's so flexible. You have to actually customize it for your organization.

Speaker B: You have to do anything for you. If you don't guide it, that's exactly. Generate reports that are useless.

Speaker C: That's exactly. Imagine 20, 30, 40 years of dashboard reporting that was custom made that now you need to incorporate that into Salesforce. And so we probably spent six to nine months, if not more just making sure, just doing the mapping of what we had and what's, what we won't be doing moving forward. And that mapping needed to take place at all three levels of people, process and tech because people were thinking that we're going to take the mainframe and all that we built custom and put it into Salesforce. And, and, and that didn't work at all. It took, it took us half a year or more to figure that out and then build net new skills in order to get Salesforce to work for us. And it was, it was an interesting journey but um, people did not account for it because everyone thought we're going to build it in Salesforce, it's going to look this way and we're going to have a couple of training sessions and everyone's going to follow along. Except that's not what happened. And uh, it was for me it was uh, an eye opener because you have to imagine 16 different business units at IBM that have been doing this and We've got to, we've got to shift that whole shift globally around and that's what we ended up doing. Um, from that regard, how do you

Speaker B: see that the people that are called to change get the support or the coaching or the training beyond just being able to run the new software or whatever that is, so that they, because if they're not communicating with one another, then they're not communicating properly with the technology and then the technology is not going to do what it's promised. How do you keep that in your culture?

Speaker C: Um, I think I'm going to work, uh, forward to back, backwards to forward. So here precisely they have a, we have a framework here around communications. And so when we have our all hands at the CEO level and our executive leadership team, that messaging is, everyone who comes hears it. But then the expectation is that the next level down of management has to be able to understand and articulate it. The next level down below that has to be able to understand and articulate it to the point where it's built into our, uh, regular cadence of communication across the team. And so the materials are provided, the information is there, the one on ones, the team meetings, the group meetings, those are not optional, they're required. And so I've been at places where, not here, but I've been at places where some individual contributors haven't seen their manager or talk to them in three months, or haven't had a one on one or could not articulate the strategy or don't understand anything about where the company vision is. And that's on us as leaders to do that. But it's also on your first line manager. Yes, there's a component of that, that's the individual contributor who's paying attention. But it was shocking to me at large companies that I've been at, where the memos go out, the announcements go out, the press releases go out, but no one's connecting the dots to what does it mean for me as a support person, as a manager. I've had uh, some managers feel comfortable enough to raise their hand and said, laurent, I don't understand this, can you come to my team meeting? Or what's the message that I'm supposed to get here? Uh, with that all hands that we have. And so those are the folks that are proactive and raise their hands. There are others who don't raise their hands and they just continue on. And those, those are the people that are creating the additional gaps in the organization. And so when efficiency or execution or people not following along to what you, as you said, Tom, to how do we connect the dots? That's where the breakdown begins. Because then it's that expensive. Circle the wagons to go and bring those folks along, where you have half your team who got it and the other half was still stuck three years ago from where they were. And I've been super intentional, like me personally, as I've led different teams and to take the time to go and have those conversations at the various levels in order to connect the dots, because it's an expensive journey when you, you, you deploy technology, millions of dollars of technology, and only a third of the team even understands it or uses it or knows it where the other two thirds are still on spreadsheets and napkins, uh, doing their work, if you will.

Speaker A: I think one big component that goes into it is one. You're right. What I've seen as well is that we want to fast track to launch, right? And so if there isn't someone in place to ask the question of why are we even doing this? Because guess what, everybody who has to adopt this new technology, especially if they've been decades doing something different as humans, we need to understand, why should I even do this differently?

Speaker C: That's right.

Speaker A: I mean, to steal from Simon Sinek, right? Like, why Start with why? And if we can't articulate that down at their level, we can expect to face resistance. I mean, it's that simple, right? And I love the scaffolding communication strategy. You're right. It starts at the top. And you have to have, I believe that you have to have trust at each of those levels. Because, you know, you mentioned there was a manager that raised his hand, said, hey, I don't get this. Can you help me understand? But if you don't have a culture where you can say, I don't get this, it all just gets pushed down. And maybe there's all this technical gobbledygook, right, that looks great to all the tech people that wrote it, but the person on the front line, like, uh, this means nothing to me in the cog that I'm building on the line. Right?

Speaker C: That's exactly right. And it's funny, um, we had, uh, one of our initiatives here at Precisely and my team. So I've been, I've been, you know, trying to change some things that, that for the better. And one person's like, I don't understand why lead generation, for example, would be part of support. Support is, uh, we do cases here. I don't get that. And why are we even talking about lead Generation. And so back to connecting the dots to what we were talking about earlier. I said, okay, so our bonuses, our raises, and all of those things. You have your top line, you have your bottom line. Part of our top line is helping, making sure that if there's an opportunity that you hear in support, where if, uh, 100 cases from a customer comes in and 80 of them are, how do I do this, that or the other? Or they're using support and to get trained versus the training package that they declined at the beginning of their journey, that's an opportunity. If they're coming to support for professional services, architecture tuning and sizing and things that are out of scope for support, that's also an opportunity to create a lead for professional services to follow up. And so this is, this is, um, it's a live use, uh, case that I have here where we're actually rebuilding the way in which we engage our counterparts in the other areas. Because folks are so skilled here. Can they train customers? Sure, but it's not our function. Can we do the architecting and sizing? Yes, but it's not on an sow. And so we can say to a customer who just bought a million dollars of software, well, here's how you have to architect it, because that person happens to have this skills, but it's not covered contractually. Right. And so when the person leaves, oh, but I talked to Tom, and Tom said, this is how I can architect it. Except Tom forgot three pieces. And oh, wait, there is no sow. And wait, there's no scope of work and there is no. You see where this is going?

Speaker B: You can be blind. Tom had no clue. He just came to mind.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And so this is live. It's happening right? It's happened right now. So we're redoing our whole lead generation process specifically because, oh, by the way, this is how we used to do it. Laurent. And it's like, no, we've got to fix this and make it better for. For everyone. Repeatable process globally, if you will.

Speaker B: So. So when I heard your answer to the question, uh, it was clear that your process made it easier. Your clarity of process made it easier to communicate the need to engage with whoever you're engaging. So now I'm going to ask you, suppose there's a listener. And when you described a situation when that was missing at another company, and they're thinking, I'm feeling maybe a much smaller company than yours, they're thinking, I. I'm feeling pressure to adapt to the new technology. And I realize we haven't even had the conversation necessary to lay the groundwork. And so we're going to run off and get all these AI tools and we're going to be clueless. What are some questions that are foundational before you go running over after the latest and greatest technology, whatever that may be.

Speaker C: So decisions, um, that I've had to make and not myself only, but the team of people is that do we build it or do we buy it? Right? Um, and more importantly, is this a tech problem or is this a process problem? We talked about that. It's kind of all related. And so I go back to the use case scenario of what is it that ails us, that we're trying to solve and that is what drives everything else, right? And so luckily here at precisely, we have an AI, uh council, right? I've been at places where people have like, uh, I've been at places where I've had 3, 4, $500,000 of budget to do. Go, go, go, go buy stuff, right? And what that creates is an unorganized, ungoverned set of technologies proliferating through the system without a process where security vets it, without a process where the AI council vets it, without a process where, uh, it doesn't even meet the standards of the company. And then now back to my comment of having to go back, you have to go back and rip this stuff out, right? And then you just wasted six or seven months. And so for, uh, for me it's, you have to have a process in place to evaluate what is it that you're trying to solve and whether we have tools already that you, I may not even know about in another division. And then you come back and say, okay, do we build it internally with the smart people that we have, or do we go get something commercially available? And so I'm a big pilot fan. Like, I love piloting stuff. And so I meet a lot of people around the industry that offer to do that and say, hey Laurent, we'll do this. I, I can openly share, uh, Grammarly. We've been, we've been speaking to them about some stuff around, uh, consistency of answer and quality of answer to our customers. And so we've decided that's a, a, a, a technology that we, we want to bring in. But we spent six weeks piloting it just now. And even though on the surface we see the commercials, we know what Grammarly does. But how does, how is Grammarly going to specifically work? For the use cases that I have, we have multilingual situations we have English as a second language. We have English as a first language. We also have the need to communicate good news, bad news and different news. We were not going to fix this enhancement request. Uh, this is going to be in the next release or you need to go pay for professional services. If you have 200 people around the world that have to deliver this message, you are guaranteed that the message is not going to land correctly. 200 times, times thousands of tickets.

Speaker A: And so you left 200 versions of it.

Speaker C: 200 versions. So that's what we said. We want to not be robotic in our communications with customers, but have a standard, have a brand standard, a tone standard, a, a, a, a level, um, of speaking that is not too formal, not too informal, but just right according to the precisely brand. Because as you know, most companies spend tons on branding. And so that's what precise Grammarly uh, is going to help us do to mirror what we want our customers to hear from us. Whether you're in India or Australia or the US or South America. That's what we're doing there. And so uh, that's how I would answer the question in the sense that you have to have governance in place for all this tech. Otherwise if you have people with loose budgets and spending willy nilly. Oh, a friend of mine showed me this at golf or whatever and next thing you know you have all this tech and now you're going to have to walk it back and start taking some things out. Hopefully that answers your question. But that's the.

Speaker B: I would like to add one if I may, which is, uh, what are some foundational questions on the people, um, strategy side? How ready are they? Because you might have this council who said this is the, this we got to go this way. And then you have people with tenure that are scared because they're the best at running the current process. Now they're feeling like they're just out of college again. So what are suggestions for people readiness?

Speaker C: Absolutely. Um, support readiness is something that a lot of companies don't really invest in. Right. They kind of say well, so, and so should just pull themselves up and, and figure it out. But what I've found over the years is, is simply um, people leave, uh, technologists leave the people portion towards the end as an afterthought. And that's one of the biggest mistakes that even I've seen in my journey. Uh, I've, I've done as well where it's like, how hard is this? Go, go do it right. And one of the things that we ask Is, do. Do you have. Do they. Not only do they have the skills or do they have the willingness? I have people who, uh, have said to me, I'm not interested. I just want to do this. I'm going to retire in three years. Leave me alone. Literally. And so you have to figure out, okay, how many change agents and believers do we actually even have? And you also have to account for, there are some people who will not be on board. And steady Eddie, steady Jane. It may be okay, depending on the product area. In some cases, it may not be okay. And either a skill, uh, uplift has to happen, or a removal altogether. Right? The last resort. And so once you identify what kind of group you have, then you have to start targeting those change agents within the group. And some of them are kind of like, you have to see it to believe it in order for them to try it. Others are like, hey, my CSAT's 100%. I've been here for X number of years. My system works. Laurent. So all of this new stuff is great, but customers love me. They send me cookies at Christmas. Uh, I don't need to do any of this newfangled AI stuff. I'm not making this up. These are real conversations that I've had with people. And so what happens over time is you start to see from, uh, their. They start to see their colleagues getting more efficient. They're using our internal, uh, tools, our, uh, AI Chatbot. Uh, they're hearing me say things like, oh, by the way, 55% of our customers who search on our portal find a solution without us. Oh, by the way, we have 45% of our web tickets that start off where customers are starting to type a web ticket that all of a sudden are abandoned because we surfaced a solution. Uh, numbers since I've been here in the last year have increased by 10, 10, 15%. Not because of me, but because the tech is actually working. Right? And so as they start to see that, then they start to raise their hand and ask questions. But then we start to go back and say, okay, what help do you need to get you to where you need to be? What we found was some people don't understand AI, even though they may have a smartphone, or they'd be like, I don't think my father in law will ever hear this, but my father in law, who still has a flip phone and doesn't have a smartphone and refuses to go that route, right, we're still trying to get them there. Um, but you have some flip phone error. Folks who don't want anything to do with it. And you have to be able to account for that. And you can't say because this person's stuck there, they can't work here anymore. It's more, okay, this is what they can contribute to the organization. You're going to need to do at least this while two thirds of everyone else is moving the business forward. And so it may be kind of unorthodox because you have some people who are like, they need to embrace this or else they can't work here. It's more, okay, are they adding value in the way in which they're doing it? And is do we have enough of a groundswell of people, believers I call them, that will move the business forward. And I found that you have to just find that balance between the two.

Speaker A: Yeah. So maybe their job needs to change a little bit, right?

Speaker C: That's exactly right.

Speaker A: The job is changing anyway because the new technology is coming in or the new process is coming in. And if there's truly an unwillingness to adopt those changes, but there is significant value that that individual is bringing, perhaps their job changes, you know, perhaps it's, it's a style thing. It's just that just really, you know, the new way of working does not align with the way I like to work.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker A: And it could very well penalize people for that. Yeah.

Speaker C: And what's interesting is that we found some folks who just recently on my team, um, they've been to support for a while. Super stellar, works well with engineering. Move from support to engineering, move from support to pre sales, move from support to demoing for the customer, move from support to other parts of the business. And so it goes right back to assessing what is it, what is it that we're trying to solve, do we have the people to solve it? And if we don't, what are we doing with the people who can't come along right. For the. Right. And, and it's okay if you want can't come along, except you may not be able to come along and stay here permanently. There's going to be a transition period to something else. Whether it's knowledge management, whether it's non customer facing, whether it's back office type things, whatever it is. Um, and so you have to account for that. Where I would say my 20 year old self would say okay, this person can't be here. I think I, I think age is starting to softened me up a bit because my 20 year old self experience. Is that what it is? I don't know. Uh, but That's. Those are the kind of things that I think about. And I know we. I kind of went off in a different direction there, Tom, but I think that's right.

Speaker B: That's right on the deck. Because you said you don't separate the people, the technology. You separate them to understand them, but they go along together. And your first answer was on the technology in the process. And then when we got to the people, I thought it was crystal clear answer. Thank you.

Speaker C: Fair enough. Fair enough. So, like I said, I, uh, My. My older self is, uh, getting to be a little softer, if you will. Uh, and I think it's because of the travels that I've had, um, you know, trying to deploy a certain tech across the business.

Speaker A: Yeah. I call that experience rather than experience.

Speaker C: Okay, fair enough. Fair enough.

Speaker B: Guess what time it is, Adrian.

Speaker A: Oh, but I have so much on my mind.

Speaker B: It's always the case. We go so fast, but we got time for.

Speaker A: Well, I can underscore. I think I just want to sort of summarize and underscore. What really came out for me as you described that was that there's. There's a need for agility and an openness because, as you're describing, know what you've seen to become a best practice of bringing people along. It's an acceptance that people are individuals. And, um, we're all good at different things. We all have a different way of doing things. You can categorize that, right? I mean, we're not. I mean, yes, we're individuals, but there are ways to categorize it. But when you start breaking down the silos with. In an organization and looking at it from, what are we trying to achieve here? What are our business goals? Who do we have doing those things? And if someone in a technical role is great at explaining the technical pieces. They love doing it, but they love explaining it too. Could we have that person go talk to a prospect? Maybe we just have. If it's open enough. Yeah. Why can't we do that? Because they're good at that. And guess what? If they're good at it, they probably enjoy doing it. They'll be happier. They'll be engaged. That will translate to the prospect, and your business results get better. Right. What would you say? You know, I guess as my final question, kind of comment on. On. On that.

Speaker C: Absolutely. And, uh, a person on my team comes to mind. Hopefully he doesn't mind if I mention his name. So. Got a distinguished engineer on our team, Sean. Uh, Sean is all kinds of awesome. Just a generally awesome Human being. Right. But from a technical perspective as well. He is in support, he's on my team, he reports to me. However, Sean is participating in Proof of concepts. He's working with sales, he's working with development, he's working with product management, he's working with the executive leadership team, he works with my operations team. But he still has that initial role of distinguished engineer within support. He came from a support background, uh, as well, but he's taken his skills and removed all the silos and boundaries to say where does the company need me? And so right now we're um, all hands on deck for our Data Integrity Suite, which is our flagship product. And so he's leaned into that with all the years of experience that he has and he goes where the problem is and that needs to be solved for the greater good. And so he and I get along. I get along with most people, literally 99% of people. And I thrive in a space where there are no boundaries. Like I don't see my role in support as just a support role. It's where is the problem in the company that needs to be solved. And if I can contribute and partner with someone else, I go do that. And that's where the greatest reward, not only for me personally, professionally, but for the company. Because if everyone took the approach of, uh, it's not my job, it's a sales problem, it's an engineering problem, it's an other problem, it's a company problem of where you work. And so I use Sean as an example. Hopefully he doesn't mind if he ever hears this, uh, because he embodies that where it doesn't matter where the problem exists. If I have the skills or if I can contribute and add value, go do that. And so as I've come up through support, uh, from support engineer all the way to where I am now, that's what I found to be my sweet spot and unique value prop that I bring to the table. And for me, uh, where most people say why are you getting involved in that? For me it's fun because I love m going after these kind of difficult, complex, multi layered problems and coming out of the other side with a solution because everybody wins at that point. Uh, so I think that's how I would answer that and leave it that way. And you know, 30 years later this is why I'm still having fun doing what I do.

Speaker B: And it shows. And thank you so much for sharing with us. Uh, this will really help our community.

Speaker C: Absolutely. So thank you for having me. Let's do this again sometime. Love to talk to people, uh, and process as well. So I appreciate you guys having me on.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Thank you for joining us.

Speaker C: Absolutely.

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