I’ve been attending software conferences for my entire career.
This is rather rare for a woman of *my age* in mid-life, but I was fortunate to land a job right out of college at a small consulting firm in Minneapolis that was helping small to medium size businesses implement accounting software.
The main product we worked with at that time was called Great Plains, and given that the company was based in Fargo, North Dakota, it was appropriate that their annual conference was called “Stampede” 🦬(I kid you not. Midwest culture at its best.)
(Fun fact, the CEO of Great Plains software at that time was Doug Burgum, current governor of North Dakota. And another fun fact is that the company’s next product was Dynamics, the same one that is now part of Microsoft.)
The next big software ‘ecosystem’ that I joined was Oracle. I spent 6+ years in my twenties and early thirties leading Oracle Financials implementations throughout LatAm and EMEA for multinational companies. That involved attending numerous Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) conferences, and occasionally speaking at them.
And finally, about 10 years ago, Denamico became a HubSpot Solutions Partner and since then, we’ve been attending HubSpot’s annual Inbound conference.
The number of attendees and the locations of Stampede, OAUG, and Inbound have been wildly different, but the energy and inspiration is the same.
People that work in software are disruptors and innovators. They love to solve problems🤔, and the more complex and challenging, the better. They want to do things faster and easier. For themselves and their customers. It’s what drives them.🛞
Yesterday at Inbound we heard from HubSpot’s CEO, Yamini Rangan, their CTO, Dharmesh Shah, and their EVP of Product, Andy Pitre, to learn about where the company, the software, and the world of business is going.
Yamini opened her keynote by acknowledging that the past year or so has been tough for many companies. Business growth has not been easy to come by and the formula for what works has changed.
We need to figure out a new way to grow and scale our companies. Yamini stated, “technology is profound when it solves old problems in new ways”.
It was a perfect segue for Andy’s announcement that they’ve made over 200 updates to the product, many of which address challenges that salespeople and marketers in particular have experienced since the beginning of time.
Time intensive tasks such as researching a prospect before you reach out to them, creating a personalized video - and editing it, repurposing a podcast for a LinkedIn post, etc.
The solution for many of these laborious activities is AI. Imagine having a team of AI ‘agents’ working on your behalf to do all of the tedious tasks required in the daily life of a salesperson, marketer, or customer service rep. Well you don’t even need to imagine it, you can actually see it because they’re available in beta today.
A couple of years ago, we made a video for Denamico, probably inspired by a trip to Inbound😂, where we talked about the ‘new speed of business’.
A team member recently came across it in our archives, thought it was fantastic, and asked why we stopped using it. I wasn’t actually sure, but it was probably because it hadn’t been getting much traction so we took it offline. The crazy thing is that it is even more relevant today than it was when we made it.
Our world now is moving at warp speed. It is increasingly difficult for companies to compete and stay relevant if they’re relying on how they’ve always done things.
And for the companies in industries who are known to be slow in adopting new technology (real estate, construction, architecture, higher education, some manufacturing, non-profits, etc), this is for you📢… If you don’t turn this weakness into your strength, you’re going to lose out.
There is SO much to be gained in efficiencies, better experiences for employees and customers, revenue and margins by embracing technology, but the longer it takes us to incorporate our technology ‘practice’ into our businesses, the harder it will be to catch up. And if we wait too long…😬
Jaime Taets, a recent RevOps Champion podcast guest, believes that “Technology should be an enabler, not a hindrance”. I couldn’t agree more.
Technology becomes a hindrance if we’ve purchased software we don’t need, or if we aren’t investing sufficient resources to incorporate it into our processes to help us reach our business goals. Or, it could also be a hindrance if we’re avoiding it because we don’t have time, it’s too expensive, or ‘things seem to be ok right now’.
We need to start thinking about technology as part of our workforce. It’s impossible for our human teams to be sufficiently effective and productive without it.
Leveraging technology to the extent that it becomes part of our competitive advantage is not a one and done implementation. It requires dedicated resources that focus on continuous improvement.
One of the best things about tech conferences is that you get to learn from smart people who inspire you about how the world can be better.
For us at Denamico, that means helping our clients get better at using their ‘technology team’ so they’re able to provide a better experience for their human teams and their customers. This is what will enable them to also grow and scale their organizations.
And for me personally, I’m inspired to keep learning to continuously improve how and where I spend my time so I can have the greatest impact on the things that are most important to me. And after Inbound this week, I’ll be looking at where we’ve got the most time intensive manual processes in the business so we can shift that work over to the AI agents 👾.
Cheers to you and to making life better for all of us,
Kristin