00:22:20 · Teresa Carlson
And how do I learn the business in a way that I'm interpreting it in the right way to make sure that we're growing? So it was just a really different dynamic.
00:22:31 · Molly O'Shea
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00:24:34 · Teresa Carlson
[00:24:34] S0: Well, one of the things that we did at Amazon, at AWS, that I really loved is we would say, we'll do this till we know better. And that is a really good way to look at any business and be innovative because you got to constantly be looking around corners. And the thing I would say to my team, like literally we build out how you did sales around this. Like there was no model of how like in Salesforce or there isn't, there is not a good approach or methodology to how you did forecasting as an example. Because again, if you're forecasting based on a server license, that's easier. I'm selling a 100 of this, I'm getting X amount of dollars. In cloud computing, we were launching so many services that one, we had to keep all our people fresh and trained because we went from like the first year I was there launching 23 new services till last year, I want to say it was like 2,800 new services and features. And it was the sellers, the account executives, I hated to call them sellers. I wanted them to be account focused and customer. So our customer account executives had to really understand and know those services. So one, I had to ramp up like sales orientation, product orientation to make sure that our teams were fresh. So I built up a training and certification team internally and made sure people got trained up. You know, I tried to listen to what they were telling me that they needed more of, my teams, my people in the field. How did we build programming around field marketing to make sure that we were, to your point on industries, you can't just go and talk to a customer in one way. You can't go to financial services or agriculture, environmental, or defense and talk to them exactly the same way that you're talking to telecommunications, right? You've got to have a story that they understand when you're talking about your service. So we started building out more of that. But also the thing was data. One of my big lessons was data. I got really good and I built out an unbelievable business operations team on how we looked at our data. And we built things with Tableau dashboards, and we wanted something that we continually understand how customers were buying and what they needed.
00:27:01 · Teresa Carlson
Because again, if you're only paying for what you use and you're looking at usage as your bar around this, like your sales environment tool, and you're saying, okay, I'm looking at usage now. And if all of a sudden you forecast it up here and a customer drops down because of a workload, we needed to understand capacity. Like we need to understand what type of capacity did our customers need. And the reason that was important was because my building team, the team at AWS that was building all of those clouds and all that infrastructure, if all of a sudden I had massive customers coming online, and then my infrastructure team at Amazon would say, We don't have enough capacity. So I had to learn how to do capacity planning with our tech teams. And so we did a lot of capacity planning, and we had to teach our customers, let's look at what workloads that you're going to bring online, and let's think about capacity. Because we never wanted to go to a customer and say, sorry, we don't have enough space for you. I mean, you're talking about mission critical activities. So these are the kind of things my brain was constantly like, so it wasn't just a widget selling anymore. We were actually helping define capacity. We were working with our infrastructure and services teams that built the tools. And we would say to our services teams, hey, the Intel team needs this. Can we build it? And we would work closely with them to update a tool or build a new tool. So the Dynamics and Cloud working in the field with a customer was like I was attached to the hip with my team in Seattle. Like it was that's what made it so fun actually, because I felt like I did something more than just delivering. I was actually with my team shaping what we were building and giving that continuous feedback loop so to ensure that as a company, we were delivering really what the customer was asking for, not just what we thought they needed. And that was a good combination, I think.
00:29:13 · Molly O'Shea
[00:29:13] S1: What was it like building this out in step with Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy? What were the biggest lessons that you learned from them?
00:29:21 · Teresa Carlson
[00:29:21] S0: Well, the first lesson I learned when I got there, never put a PowerPoint presentation in front of anybody. We did not use PowerPoint. And I don't know if you've heard that before, but we did not use PowerPoint inside. Everything was a written document. You had to be prolific at writing and telling a story. Things were storytelling inside the company. And I will never forget the first meeting I did with Andy, and he walked in with some of his leaders, and we were a smaller team, but I had a beautiful PowerPoint. Nobody would even look at it. I was like, I was just mortified, but I never made that mistake again. So I had to actually realize they were a company that dove really deep into the details. And you had to be more prepared. I think my brain worked harder when I was there because I had to go relearn things I'd forgotten as a leader running a public sector business. Like they would ask me very detailed things about contracting and compliance and why. They wanted to know why and understand why I was asking for something and what it would achieve and what would be the risk. And you, you know, your brain, you just really have to be on top of your game constantly. And I feel like they helped me stay on top of my game. And I learned that what you write down and how you tell that story needs to be crisp. Don't use a bunch of extra words. Tell the story, get to the point, drive on your outcomes, make sure you define the risk, don't hide risk. It was a big thing there. Like we actually believe that we could do anything. And what I mean build anything, Amazon is a company of builders. When I was there, we built things. And we believed that we could build and do things, but we wanted to understand all the risk. So if you didn't outline your risk, people kind of saw that as a red flag that you were kind of trying to pull the wool over their eyes and say, oh, this will be okay. You really needed to talk about all the potential risk. And then we would talk about what we could do about them. And that I think is what a lot of companies miss is they don't spend time saying, look, we know this is a risk. And is it a one way door or two way door? And Jeff talked a lot about one way and two way doors. A one way door is if you made that decision, you couldn't get back. And it was, it could be amazing or detrimental.