Streamline Your Digital Sales Process for Technology Industry

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what's the minimum viable experiment right how can you take this notion this this thing that we all thought was true and bring it into a very concise set of assumptions and a very clean experiment welcome to the Microsoft Partner Network podcast every week we bring in industry leaders and Microsoft partners to talk about the big ideas shaping business and technology today welcome back to the Microsoft Partner Network podcast series I am here at Microsoft inspire and super excited to be joined by CTO of pax 8 Michael demo welcome thank you all right so you're here at inspire please tell me about yourself what are you excited about have you learned anything cool and tell me what pax eight is up to yeah it's great to be here at inspire I've met a lot of great people had a lot of good connections with with the Microsoft team and just really excited to meet a lot of new vendors and partners in the space it's it's been it's been amazing I'm c2 at PAX 8 so I'm responsible for developing our platform the command console tax tax I also run our marketing operations team which is a little different but we're we're a little bit different at PAX 8 my background is is in development I'm a computer science computer science background I started out in my career at Raytheon and my guess my big claim to fame there was I created the analysis tool for orchestrated measurement which is a really effectively a platform creating for creating expert systems for store telemetry analysis and so all of that is meant to give flight operations engineers insights into what's happening on the spacecraft right so when you know you're getting a bunch of numbers back from the spacecraft and in my case it was it was GPS and and the James Webb Space Telescope as well as some closed area projects and you as you're getting all that data from the background you need to understand what's going on with satellites so you can take action on it and so that's what our tool did it provided a platform and a framework for technicians engineers and scientists to go and understand what was going on with the burden how have you used that and what you're working on at pax 8 well you know I think one of the things that we do at pax 8 is we integrate with a whole lot of different vendors so we're integrated with Microsoft we're integrated with all the partners we sell with and so that those integrations what we need to do is we need to get a good understanding of how those are going and so being able to monitor them seeing what's going on with those API transactions and then gather that data into a relevant way is really core to our operational efficiency and practice awesome so we want to have a little bit about artificial intelligence what are you up to you and your organization what does that mean to you and what are you guys starting to implement absolutely you know we just came out with pax eight stacks which is a really a business intelligence tool for our partners to use to identify gaps in their practice so maybe there's some products that they could go and sell and what are the easy opportunities for them to sell to their customers now with that that's that's really the foundational tool that we're building and right now it's really based on some insights we gleaned from power bi and using that tool internally to develop a really really an expert system for our partners now when we take that motion of just understanding what data can do for you we extend that across our organization so I mentioned that I lead our marketing operations team and that's something that we've been able to find a lot of success in AI right so marketing and sales is really all about getting the right product in front of the right person at the right time and then understanding how to best use your sales person's time right and so we have lots of data we have you know traffic data we have Purchase History data we have support ticket data we have all kinds of data that's within PACs aid and so one of our first steps as part of this journey was to collect that data inside of a data warehouse on Azure and I think as yours really the right place to do it it is then it's it's amazing the way that it works easily and quickly with the power bi system with the power bi tool and so as we've collected this data now what do you do well it's it's so much data you can't have someone say hey I have an assumption and I want to go validate that by reading every health ticket that came in this month we're at a scale now that's simply not possible and that's kind of where we start out it started out so how do we how do we leverage AI to go and deliver a customer experience that's very very facile and and and and very excellent and that's kind of where we're focusing our AI efforts on can give me an example or what kind of insights are you seeing your customers are looking for and you're using the AI to drive some of those answers yeah absolutely one of the things that you know internally we've done is we're able to say hey you know we saw a dip in sales in this product you know we saw some cancellations in this product line what happened there and the amazing thing about about power bi is it really gives you the tools to go tell a story very quickly right so you can leverage quick insights to say hey turns out the the majority of these cancellations were focused around maybe a particular day or maybe with a particular service delivery motion and so now we're able to go and dig into that and understand what's happening as far as a customer can is concerned with pack stocks it's really about identifying the next sale right and so if I'm able to deliver the right content to the partner at the right time hey I see that you're interacting with this tool to do some updates to this this user or to this company to this customer you know what would be great for that customer is this set of products and we bait and we can base that off off parametric's like hey this is the industry they're in this is they're buying history this is how they're growing now we can help you get out in front of what your customer needs are by providing a tool that actually says hey other customers like this like your customers are gonna need this and this is a great sales opportunity for it and by the way now here's the content that we've identified that's most effectively at capturing that sale from your customer so it's really a value add for those that work for you work with your company that's awesome you know actually I think it's both it is a value add for the people that work for us and it's a company valued for the people that work with us you know a taxi we are we think people first right and so if there's something that we can to make our people more effective right we're absolutely gonna take advantage of that and AI is definitely a key compart of that whether it's bi or I have my entire engineering team they have an an open-door policy on on any training they want to pursue and so they've actually set up or we set up organically with maybe some push from the top to say okay let's start looking at AI and I want I want half of my engineers now to be able to competently execute in the AI practice right so now I take that and how do I extend that beyond beyond just the engineering department and I think that's where power bi comes in you know being able to access the data and where we have you know again over a dozen employees now or team members that are leveraging or that are using and active have actually taken power bi training so can you talk a little bit about that training piece actually on stage yesterday on jets and Altaf talked about one of our priorities being around learning and readiness training is super important especially as new talent gap only gets bigger and bigger so can you talk a little bit about you said it was a little bit of executive bye he had to a little bit of push from the top right but that is an important piece of building you know AI practice so within pax 8 we have an entire an entire department packs at U which is led by Susan Mitnick and and really that department is responsible for creating a culture of learning right so whether it's a new hire that's going into the sales function or it's someone that's you know a developer that's been around for for 25 years and has been with pax 8 for four five this is something now that we want to ingrain into our culture and I think a key piece of that is LinkedIn learning we have made LinkedIn learning available to our entire organization so that if you want to get access to all that great content we're giving it to you it's such a low cost and it's such a huge return on investment I can't tell you how many times we've had someone who came in at one role and crew into something that was a really incredible transformation for them because of tools like LinkedIn learning like the AI school and then coupling that with just a corporate culture of training and learning and bettering yourself that's awesome I love that can you talk him you know talk about the building out the AI strategy what was that like what was the process how long did that take what did you do obviously it's the training in the people mm-hmm well let's walk through that if there's partners or just thinking about okay maybe I should I should think about this absolutely so at PAX a we we leverage a working group model to to around key or area so product operations salient marketing operations but one of those key areas for us is data operations and so we have it we have a data operations working group that centers around dysfunction and it was established as part of an executive retreat that says okay hey data is a really important part of our ultimate success and taking that data and now applying the the tools that we need to to be successful and actually leverage that data naturally is going to push you into an AI so it was really you know within this working group there's executives there's people in the trenches so to speak and it's really a cross-functional group of people that are really there to come up with our strategy for data and that really does very quickly lead you into AI okay so you just launched pax eight stacks can you tell me about the process it took to get to this launch yeah absolutely you know this is a relatively new area for pax 8 and so part of this was establishing a data operations working group and this is something this is a group of people that involves it's cross-functional members everyone from finance development marketing sales we're all there to understand what our data tells us and so the first thing we needed to do as part of this process was just get a handle on our data right our data lives in in our CRM tool our data lives in our operational database our data lives in our support system now we have to gather all that data in and have it in a cogent place and now once we've got that done now we need to work have our this analyst to say okay what is this day of telling us and that can be a really really complicated question because whoa what do you want to know from your data right do you and what do you want to get you know get from your data and and for us we we have kpi's established across our organization whether it's whether it's at the top level or you know all the way down to we encourage everyone down to the manager level to develop their own KPIs now we really need to be able to develop assumptions from this and this is really where this operational working group comes into into play we say okay here's a piece of you know here's a KPI and how do we improve this well I think we could we can maybe improve this if we could do a better job of delivering the right content to to the partner in a more timely matter now from that the natural motion from that should be okay let's create an experiment and this goes back to you know your Oda loop your observe orient decide and act and you really want that to be short and so what's the minimum viable experiment right how can you take this notion this this thing that we all thought was true and bring it into a very very concise set of assumptions and a very clean experiment and so from that that's how you develop it right you want to be agile and you want to get that little loop really executing as quickly as possible is it a loop an official term it's not a techie term yes shows I'm not super techie we don't live there like it's like oompa-loompa been talking a lot about artificial intelligence here at this conference and it's just kind of like the buzzy term right you know where do you see it having the most impact is it that from a functional cm standpoint you're talking a little bit about marketing in sales or is it more societal where do you see the impact happening well I think for us it's all about making people more effective right I think that you know with any introduction of Technology the ultimate goal is to is is to make people able to do more with less right and so used to have accountants going through spreadsheets and tabulating forms and and doing things by hand and then maybe a9q is introduced and then you had you know VisiCalc and Excel right I think it's so hard to see where a a is gonna lead us because it's gonna be such a paradigm shift in a whole lot of areas but the key the core of what's gonna happen is it's gonna make a whole lot of job functions much more effective you know no no salesperson likes to get rejected right no salesperson wants to make a hundred cold calls and get turned down on 90 of them how can how can we use AI to make that better to make their you know that their experience and their lives better really when it comes down to it right no I think that's super super helpful it is there you know any best practices and tips or things that you learned or common pitfalls that you can talk about absolutely you know one thing you need to understand is that AI is not a magic bullet right when we you know when we talk about it is such a buzzword right everyone wants to do AI and machine learning and this is going to be great but you have to temper that with is it the right tool for this job and then from there you need to understand what biases are you bringing to hate hey I I saw this I saw the spike in in data and and power bi told me it was you know because of because of the actions of this piece of the process well maybe that's true maybe it's not you have to be very careful about the biases you bring to the table and start small it start with something that's that's manageable start with something that is an experiment that makes sense for the tool for AI and then you know get after it in a small way how are you hoping your team's not bring their biases into their assumptions absolutely I think QA is is critical to and actually looking at QA not just from the Santa did I put it I put this in and this came out but now understanding hey the the function of QA is is it is it the right result and then taking that a step back is it's almost a user acceptance testing in a whole new light right to say the trends that I'm understanding are they the right trends or is this tool replicatable and scalable when we actually push it to production so is that where the human brain comes into it absolutely so will bots take over No so you believe humans will still be around I think yeah I think humans are always be around because the things that computer can't do very well is understand what you want right humans are always gonna be best at telling a computer what they want from it and we've seen examples in the past where you know an artificial intelligence system says okay hey I'm looking at some code and I'm trying to determine the intent of it and if I write one line if maybe that artificial intelligence system it really doesn't it has parametric starvation doesn't have enough data to actually produce the rest of that that statement well if you try and make it do that it's gonna produce you something that you it doesn't make any sense and this is where the role of humans I think should always be and this is why it's so incredible for more people to start interacting and leveraging AI and understanding what it's good for because you really don't want systems that are designed to produce what they should do right you you want to keep humans in that mix of course absolutely is there any last thing you any advice that you would give to partners if they're starting an AI practice best piece of advice you were given in the process absolutely I think you know a heading over to AI school is huge grabbing power bi and starting to look at your data and and and looking at what it can do for you is absolutely huge also just just education is really key absolutely well thank you so much for coming and today Michael have a great rest of your inspire thank you so much thanks for listening today and check out the podcast 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