Leading Matter #20 will introduce you to the General Manager of salesfoce.com’s Desk.  Leyla didn’t buy all the awful click-baiting press of the millennial generation and instinctively knew she had something to learn from them.  The result was creating a more empathetic and service oriented culture.

Desk.com belongs to the SaaS behemoth salesforce.com, but it is actually more of a start up housed inside the fortune 500 company.  This presented our guest, Leyla Seka, with a unique set of challenges.  Challenges that she has turned into opportunity.  How?  By understanding that mission, purpose and values need to drive the way that we develop, sell, and support our products and services.  Leyla has taken that approach in developing an empathetic workforce that seeks first to serve customers for no other purpose but service.  In doing so, she believes, the business benefit will be realized.

HIGHLIGHTS

On Prioritizing Mission and Culture

Leyla’s first move as GM of Desk was to identify what the current culture was, and decide whether or not it was well aligned to the mission of helping Desk customers better serve their customers.  The goal was to create an environment at Desk that helped employees feel professionally comfortable, valued, and challenged them to try new things. 

Why We Need to Learn From Millennials

The millennial employees at Desk have pushed Leyla to better understand the power of expectation.  Most tend to think that the support experience is not going to offer us too much other than some fairly painless answer to a problem or question.  Leyla’s millennial employees, however, took the view that support must be experiential, high value, and constantly reflective of the personality of what we as individuals in the company do.  In other words they had higher expectations of the support experience.  That is what we must constantly do, Leyla believes, elevate our customers expectations of what dealing with our company is going to be like, and then meet those expectations.

On the True Nature of Diversity

Leyla believes that diversity is partly achieved by not mistaking personality for culture or values.  The values are centric, they drive the culture, and they are seasoned by any and every personality type that can align themselves to the values. 

Why Empathy is the Most Important Trait of the SaaS Sales Representative 

SaaS sales is different than what software sales has been in the past, and the support infrastructure that supports sales today is not nearly as vast as it once was.  The key, then, to successful SaaS selling?  Empathy.  If we truly understand our customers, what they care about, how they are serving their marketplace, then we are in a better position to challenge them to raise their games.  In doing so we not only solve their needs, we help them advance their mission.