The Golden Years

This will be a long post, and it's mostly for my own purposes to document this information somewhere, but maybe some people will find it interesting.

When I started in Customer Support, I just wanted to have a job that paid decently well and that I at least somewhat enjoyed doing every day, and I did.  The office was a great environment.  I really liked Brian, my manager, and later Keyur after I moved to an advanced team, though he wasn't in our office.  The team in Kansas was small, as most of the Support team was in California.  Initially, the team was just Dennis, Kiley, Steve, Drew, and me, and soon Kevin joined as well.  Steve, Drew, and Kevin became great friends and are still three of my closest friends even today.  Later others joined, including Connor, Mitch, Trevor, Phil, Derek, Patrick, Ryan, Jeffrey, Matthew, Bruce, Jesse, and others.  We had such a fun group of guys in the office, that it was always enjoyable to be there, because you knew you could strike up a fun and nerdy conversation at any time.

As far as the job itself, I liked working with the product.  Our product was a powerful software application that provided useful business functionality and was very configurable and extensible, which made it fun to work with, and fun to try to troubleshoot and reproduce issues.  I also really enjoyed working with our customers to help solve their problems.  Some were general questions, or maybe some small part of some report wasn't working quite right.  But some were critical production-down issues at major banks, where tens of thousands of dollars were being lost every hour during the downtime, and the bank's CTO was alerted to the problem, and it was up to me to, as quickly as possible, diagnose and resolve the issue (it should be noted that often the root cause of the problem was not with our software, but because our software was failing, we had to figure out what other product was actually the root cause).   There were often high-pressure situations, but I enjoyed them, as my even-keel, no-stress personality worked in my favor to allow me to quickly work through the issues despite the urgency and pressure of the situation.  I wasn't assigned to those high-profile cases at the beginning, but pretty early on in my career I was moved up to the team that took the toughest and most urgent cases and worked with the most sensitive customers.  At the end of my time in Support, I was the Platinum Support account manager, meaning I personally managed the accounts of the customers who paid the most money for the highest level of Support.  I really enjoyed that role, and I found that technical account management was something that I was skilled at and something that I found rewarding.

In 2006, one of the CSEs left Support to join the Sales team as a Sales Engineer.  He told me about how it was to be in that role, and I decided I wanted to do that as the next phase of my career.  It's hard to get into Sales if you have no Sales experience, but I had a natural "in", because I knew everything about the product that I would be selling.  Sales Engineering management knew of me, and they were very excited that I wanted to be an SE, so the hiring/transfer process was very quick, and in February 2007 I became a Sales Engineer.  My main responsibility was to work with a Sales Rep (who did the pure sales part of the process) to support them from the technical side.  Companies aren't going to spend 5, 6, or even 7 figures on a software product unless they are convinced of its technical merits, and Sales Reps are not equipped to do that, but the SEs are.  So that's what I did.  I worked with the Sales Reps to move opportunities through the sales cycle by doing anything that required technical skills, whether it was a product demo, a proof of concept, or just a technical conversation.  And the stakes were high, as most of these opportunities were for $100k to $300k, and some were upwards of a million dollars.  For a small-ish company like ours, that's a lot of money.

I've loved this job.  First, it's exciting.  It's thrilling to be part of the sales process, strategically determining the proper way to position the product from a technical standpoint to convince the customer that we were the right solution.  And because our product is really, really good, I don't have to make things up.  Our product is awesome, so it's been my job to ensure they realize this and that it's a better solution than our competitors.  That also feeds into one of my innate loves: competition and winning.  I get to compete against others (other companies and specifically other technical sales teams at those companies) in order to win.  And I love winning.  Every time we win a deal, especially when it's mostly because of the technical capabilities of the product, it's a thrilling, satisfying feeling.  It's also been nice to have an increase over what Support pays, which is probably less than it should be, and to get commission.  I don't get paid anywhere near what the Sales Reps make in terms of commission, but I get something, and that's always a nice feeling to have money come in that was unexpected and not budgeted for, as opposed to Support where you know your paycheck down to the penny, as it never changes.

I've gotten to go places and see things that I otherwise never would have seen.  On business trips I got to go to New York City multiple times, I finally saw a Cubs game in Wrigley Field, I got to see my first NBA game, and I got to see a ton of MLB games.  I spent most of my time in Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee, but I got to go all over the country.  I spent a lot of time in Ohio, Michigan, Texas, Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Indiana, but I also occasionally got to go places outside my normal territory like Vancouver, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Lake Tahoe, Salt Lake City, Denver, Albuquerque, New Orleans, Arkansas, Fargo, Toronto, Baltimore, and Connecticut.  I've basically been able to travel the country for free, seeing tons of different things and different places, eating great food, meeting interesting people, and experiencing different cultures.  People always ask me why I enjoy traveling for work, and that's a big part of it.  I'm really very thankful that I've been able to have these experiences.

Meghan and I have also gotten some great trips out of it.  When the Sales Reps I work with make their quota, we both get invited to President's Club.  So Meghan and I got to go to the Atlantis Resort on Paradise Island, Bahamas in 2008, the Red Rock Resort and Casino in 2011, and Maui this year.  All of them were all-expenses-paid trips.  Free vacations are always nice.  And we even had a partially-paid vacation to San Diego.

And then there is the people and the culture.  We're a California-based company, which typically means things are more casual and more fun.  Our CEO made some business decisions at times that weren't ideal, but he did maintain a fun culture that we all loved.  He even spent much of an event one time carrying around baby Joshua.  We have a Sales and Marketing Kickoff every year, which is so much fun for me.  We learn a lot, but there are always fun events and parties and chances to hang out with my friends.  We also have technical trainings, which can be grueling, but I still love them due to all the time I get to spend with my colleagues, many of whom are friends.  I have colleagues from the Sales, Marketing, and Professional Services side that I always enjoy seeing at these events, including Rob, Mica, Pierre, another Pierre, Michelle, Steve, another Steve, Mark, Aamir, Marnie, and others.  This is in additional to all the Sales Reps I work with regularly, including Ben and Aaron, Jay, Jim, and others.  And on top of that, I've even really liked my management.  My direct manager while I've been an SE (until this February), Dylan, has been a friend, despite actually being my supervisor.  We got along so well together and spent so much time hanging out, even going to baseball games together by ourselves when on the road, separate from company events.  He has even hosted events at his cabin for our team.  His boss and my VP, David, has always been great.  He supports all of us and has our back for everything.  He does a great job running our organization.  The whole SE organization is great.  We have a super talented team, and we all work well together, and we all have fun together.

So I've been so thankful to have been at Actuate for these past 12.5 years.  And the 8.5 years that I've been an SE has been so much fun and so rewarding and so instrumental in the development of my professional skills, that it's hard to imagine a better experience that I could have had.