On The Path To Customer Success

Attending a partner’s sales event is always a rewarding experience, even if it’s not always 100% positive.

Meeting with the sales teams of our partners is not always a love fest, after all, because the people in the field meeting their customers and selling our products alongside their own often meet with concerns that need to be addressed.

That’s a part of doing business in any sector: people have questions and concerns, and sometimes they are not delivered in the most constructive way.

After attending the SGI Sales Summit last week, though, I came away from the event feeling energized by all of the fantastic comments we received at the SUSE booth from the SGI sales and executive teams.

From the CEO to the CMO to the salespeople in the field, everyone had great things to say about SUSE, in terms of our product quality and how easy we were as a company to work with. Usually there’s always some negative concerns from customers, but in this case, there wasn’t any.

It tells me that we are doing our jobs right. Being a great Linux company is not just about making the best software (though we think we do), but also about listening to the customer’s needs and addressing what they want, not what we think they want.

We seem to have gotten that right this time.

We’ll always be ready and willing to listen to all of our partner and customers concerns, of course, but it’s always nice to have the affirmation that we are doing what we have set out to do.