The World Turns and It’s All About Great Customers!
Sep 22 2018

Yes, this is my first post of 2018 and it’s almost October! The year has flown by. The children of some of my friends are in college now, my kids started school (last year of middle school and second to last year of high school), and we all just keep getting older and sometimes a little wiser.

I’m still loving my job on the Customer Success team at SailPoint, and very much appreciate that the company has the same philosophy around customer success that I do. Other than the companies I’ve founded or been on the founding team with, SailPoint is the first company I’ve worked for who shares my values around customer plus employee value and engagement.  The company values aren’t just words on a wall but, in my experience so far, they are truly manifested in the leaders and colleagues I interact with on a daily basis!

Our CEO, Mark McClain, was interviewed for this recent article in Forbes: How To Transform Your Customers Into Brand Advocates where he states “Every employee is focused on ensuring the ongoing success of our customers, which has contributed to our long-standing, 95%-plus customer retention rate.” He also says “The winning combination is simple: Listen first, build a true partnership and keep customers at the top of your priority list.”

Here are some other good articles:

What Really Matters: A Conversation With Patrick Lencioni – Chief Executive

  • “Most of the great CEOs, nobody knows who they are, primarily because they don’t want to be known, that wasn’t their goal. Their goal was to create a great organization to serve their customers and their employees well and change people’s lives.”
  • “At the heart of a great organization is a humble leader, somebody who’s doing it because they feel a great weight and responsibility in being the leader.”
  • “I just love to go places where you’re surprised by the level of humility and reality that exists.“

UT Professor Explains How Language Shapes Our Thoughts – The Alcalde

  • “So, it appears that Shakespeare was mostly right. Perhaps it would have been better to say that a rose by almost any other name would smell as sweet. If only that scanned in iambic pentameter.”

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin On Leadership In Turbulent Times – Chief Executive

  • “I think he [Lincoln] would not have used Twitter except when he had something positive to say because he knew enough to hold back those kind of emotions, you know?

How Diversity Happens – Fred Wilson at AVC

  • “A few years at our annual CEO summit, Scott Heiferman, founder and CEO of Meetup, told a room full of startup CEOs that you have to build diversity into your company from day one because if you don’t, it becomes so much harder later on. He explained that nobody wants to join a company where nobody looks like them. That really hit home and woke quite a few people up.“

Hopefully another almost 9 months doesn’t go by until I find the time and motivation to write another post. Thanks to those of you who keep on reading or stumble upon this post accidentally. 🙂 Here’s to a great 4Q for you, your families, and your companies!

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