Not every tech company likes to talk about change, at least not while they’re undergoing it anyway. There’s a good reason for that: While change is necessary for a company to grow and innovate, it can be painful for employees who find themselves with new responsibilities and goals.
SpotMe CEO Pierre Metrailler knows all about change, and he isn’t afraid to talk about it. He’s been with the company for 18 years, the last two and a half as CEO, and is guiding the enterprise engagement technology company through its next evolution into a digital experience platform.
We recently spoke with Pierre about the changes happening at SpotMe, the opportunities this has created for team members and how the company’s culture is making it all easier to navigate.
You recently spoke to Built In Chicago about plans to extend businesses into “experience platforms.” What are experience platforms and how are they leveraged by companies?
Experience platforms are an emerging category of enterprise software that helps companies undergoing digital transformations, with the ultimate goal of engaging employees and customers. With our platform, enterprise customers can build mobile-first apps without any code. These custom apps focus on enhancing the employee experience in learning and development and organizational change management, or augmenting the customer experience in business-to-business engagement scenarios.
One of the largest U.S. banks is using our platform to support their executive development programs and drive their diversity and inclusion initiatives. A global consulting firm has built their experiential learning app for managers on our platform. All top-10 pharmaceutical companies worldwide have launched apps powered by our platform to engage with healthcare professionals through medical education opportunities.
What drove this push for a broader focus, and what impact do you expect it will make on the company?
We believe in relevant and meaningful experiences that relate to business outcomes. Live event apps have essentially become point-in-time commodities that achieve none of that. Our ambition is to connect events to our customers' greater story, and you need a broader scope to incorporate a story revolving around learning, alignment, commitment and advocacy.
Our mantra has always been to help our customers solve their business problems, and today our customers are telling us that engagement — or lack thereof — is the problem. And no one knows where to start. For us, the sweet spot is combining the ease of use and short time from idea to market of a product and the freedom of a platform that lets you build custom apps without coding.
Our ambition is to connect events to our customers' greater story, and you need a broader scope to incorporate a story revolving around learning, alignment, commitment and advocacy.”
How have your teams evolved as a result of the company's transformation?
Our engineering team has been reorganized, and our product development predictability and velocity has increased. Our product team is having its busiest year ever shipping exciting capabilities. Our sales team has undergone a comprehensive transformation, and we have moved from transactional land-and-expand tactics to combining bottom-up adoption and enterprise sales. When it comes to creating customer value, our professional services team continues to deliver excellence, and we are accelerating enterprise adoption and customer enablement with our new customer success team.
Change can be challenging for employees — but it also presents new opportunities. What new opportunities has this period of evolution created for your teams?
We are partnering with the world's most successful companies — we have 80 Fortune 500 customers — and our product and services offering is shifting toward martech, edtech and HR tech. This combination makes our roles more attractive and also more transferable for our talents. Verticalized service expertise, customer success, product and enterprise sales are all new opportunities for the team to take on.
Strong company cultures make it easier for people to navigate change. How is SpotMe's culture equipped to help the team achieve their new goals?
Our values are a good starting point, but values alone are not enough. For 2019 we have set two priorities to help foster a strong culture during this change. The first is a more frequent communication cadence to ensure information moves quickly through the organization. We have opted for high-frequency and radical transparency in customer feedback, sales results and product progress.
Deliberate learning is our second priority. We learn from and share the feedback we receive from customers and colleagues to make the changes necessary to become a better company. Take our Collective Breakthrough initiative, for example. It’s our team’s internal platform to collaborate in real time on issues and challenges so that we can best understand why they happen, learn and grow as a team to prevent them from happening again, as well as address them proactively with our customers.
