Designing a New Solutions Practice
Today, I begin a series of posts to reflect on my time at CloudFactory as Director of Client Technology Solutions (CTS.) This first post will describe the state of my organization when I joined in 2021 and the three initial objectives that I addressed in my first 90 days on the job. The post will also provide a preview of other topics that I will cover in more depth in subsequent posts.
When I joined CloudFactory, the company was growing rapidly, and the sales pipeline was brimming with opportunities for the company’s data annotation services for AI teams. My team included Solutions Consultants, providing presales support to the Sales team, and Enablement Engineers, who provided post-sales engineering support for newly signed and existing clients. While the individual pre and post-sales roles had existed at the company for a few years, the idea of teaming them together in CTS was new, and that presented us with several challenges:
Very few people at the company knew what we did.
Those who knew individual team members didn’t know how to engage them.
The team members themselves didn’t know how to work with each other.
My first objective was to define the mission for the team and then orient the team members and the rest of the company around that mission.
While the first objective was foundational, my second objective was forward-looking. We needed to implement a scalable, solutions sales methodology. Until then, each account executive had used their own approach to selling based on a common set of resources provided to them. Predictably, this led to a variety of deal structures with massive inefficiencies in pre-sales and post-sales. Each signed deal included a unique architecture, unique deal terms, and plenty of open questions.
The third and final objective was to reign in our tooling assignment process. Tooling was a mess that needed cleaning up fast. I speak of the labeling software solutions (aka “tooling”) that our CloudWorkers used to deliver our data annotation services. While our competitors went to market with their own tools, CloudFactory chose to be “tool agnostic” in its approach. Opting instead to use third-party tools, which, theoretically, allowed us to find the “right tool” for each job while relieving us of the costs associated with building and maintaining proprietary software. While this approach made sense in isolation, when applied at scale, it created massive inefficiencies that lengthened the Discovery process needed to define the client’s deliverables and hampered our ability to build expertise in our annotation practices.
So, for the third objective, we needed to create a new tooling approach that allowed the flexibility we desired but also included a level of standardization that allowed us to speed up the tool assignment process.
I'm proud to say that over the first 90 days of my time, we made significant progress and set up the company for improved sales success within the first six months of my time there.
In subsequent posts, I will write more extensively about each of the three objectives, providing greater detail on my plan for achieving each of the 90-Day objectives, along with additional lessons I learned during that ramp-up period.
Please join me on this journey as I discuss the diagnosis, design, and mobilization necessary to build a new Solutions Practice at CloudFactory.