Winning customers for life. Warp Speed pioneered FDSE: embed, measure, leave a path. This is the talk I gave while still on the customer’s floor — the operating line I still run so the night shift still runs it at 2 a.m.
Jeremy Panasuk. Informatica IPS / SEAL. Dawn Foods, Jackson, Michigan. I gave this talk to my own company while I was still on the customer’s floor. The slides were short. The notes were the work. This PDF is the talk plus every speaker note — the stories, the quotes, the lunch with John, the list we held ourselves to.
I am sending it with my Warp Speed FDSE application so you can see the commitment, not a slogan. Palantir is a software provider. The people who run plants are the customers. Loyalty is the product after the product.
“Nothing happens until a sale is made.”
Yesterday I had a problem with one of my accounts at Bank of America. I had been with them since 1999 — all of my adult life. To sign up they gave me an MSOE T-shirt. Freshman year, that was more than enough to sign just about anything. I called and asked them to take 30-day and 60-day past-due notices off the account because of a lost or stolen card. Which of course was lost or stolen.
I get Ben on the phone. Obligatory hold. Ten minutes later he comes back: he can’t click the button, but he can transfer me to Kari. I told him his iSeries profile was probably set up wrong by some goof in IT. He clicked me over fast.
On hold for Kari I am already dreaming — car loan, the condo in Wrigleyville, Cubs tickets if the stock hits $20. If I won the mega-millions I would still stay at Informatica and keep working hard at Dawn. Kari greets me curt. Policy: report the credit accurately. She cannot help.
BofA could have kept me for life with two clicks — home loan, car loan, hundreds of thousands in interest. Because of a “policy,” I was gone. Satisfaction is the lowest acceptable service. Loyalty is a process, not a single action. The people who earn it get past success. They get to fulfillment.
“You don’t earn loyalty in a day. You earn loyalty day-by-day.”
Easy to say. Hard to do.
I had been working at Dawn Foods in sparkling Jackson, Michigan. Highest unemployment in the United States at the time — something approaching 10%, and that only counts people “actively looking.” Jackson County was the worst in the state. Some economists put it at 12–14%.
Customer loyalty in Jackson may mean the difference between staying in business and the unemployment line. So think about who pays you.
Once you know who pays you, it is obvious: satisfaction is the minimum amount of service we can deliver. I was not in Jackson to be satisfactory. I was there so Dawn would still want Informatica in the building when I was gone — and so the warehouse load that used to take eight hours would take one. That is loyalty you can measure. They put it on informatica.com. They still quote it: “His knowledge not only of the Informatica suite but also at the operating system level has been truly invaluable.” IPS said I was a rock star out at Dawn. That is not a personality. That is day-by-day.
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
The BI lead architect at Dawn, John, has four daughters. Sam in the Navy, in Japan. Amanda in 7th grade, just started track — 100-meter hurdles. Jordan at Georgia Tech. Darby living with her mom because she doesn’t like Dad’s rules. John’s line: “The Marines prepared me for everything except four teenage girls in the house at the same time.”
I am not wasting your time. This is the hardest thing I do. For me, anyway. Shut up and listen. Ask questions. Carnegie said it. Robert Greene said it as Law 4: always say less than necessary. The more you talk, the more common you appear. Being liked leads to being a trusted advisor. That is the first part of a buying atmosphere.
I knew John’s kids because I asked. That is not a trick. That is the work. Warp Speed’s plants will have unofficial definitions of a good part and a night operator who invented the workaround in 2011. If you do not listen, you will ship a dashboard. If you listen, you will ship an ontology the line can run.
“And they believe in you…”
Everyone in that room had something in common. We chose Informatica, and Informatica chose us. I could bet every one of us loved the product and thought it was the best. I believed we had the best data-integration suite in the market — 95% support renewal. John at Dawn Foods said he loved it. Best of breed.
When you are on the client site and they believe in you, they start believing in the platform. You represent the entire enterprise. Let the excitement show.
That is not a close. That is a relationship that closed the next product by itself. IPS upgrade work plus the DI work. Belief is downstream of like. Palantir’s stack earns the same way: not a pitch deck. A plant that tells the next vendor they are not even taking the meeting.
Tell the truth. Deliver what you promise. Do what you say. Communicate. Bring value beyond the product. Be on time.
At Dawn a lot of things were going wrong — process and people. I did not skirt it. Tell the truth and back it with observations. Because they like you, they will try to understand where you are coming from and open other doors in the company.
There was no accountability for internal IT to deliver. No bill-back to the business. No pain for a change the business wanted. That was changing with IPS in the building. Lead by example. Deliver what you promised. Then step above it.
Before IPS, the CIO was set on a $50–$70/hour guy from another consulting group. John brought them in. Lackluster. That was our chance. Gene and I delivered documentation above what was expected. We were on site before the customer arrived and after they left. We made a list and held ourselves to the list. Weekly email on milestones. Lunch. Friendship is not extra. It is the channel.
Dawn had a sincere lack of project management. Velocity project plans and work-breakdown structures for BI were a major value-add. Always look for the thing that is not being done that would give the plant visibility. Show up when you said you would. If they are late, don’t worry.
01 Tell the truth. Once truth is violated, trust evaporates and may never return.
02 Deliver what you promise. People hope you will. Then they measure you.
03 Do what you say you will do. Reliability is the test.
04 Communicate in a timely manner. Rapid response shows you care.
05 Bring value beyond the product. What you do to help them succeed is your character.
06 Be on time. Respect for their clock. Proof you are reliable.
Give away what you want. If you want trust, trust them. Gitomer.
“When you close a sale, you open a relationship.”
Confidence in you — and in the platform — is built on work you already did, and work other IPS people already did. Then you build confidence in the customer’s ability to do it next time without you in the chair.
At Dawn we started with the easiest thing: a quick hit to get PowerCenter 8.6 up. When we hit problems installing MDM, they already had confidence we would resolve it. They had basic integration performance issues. Adding an index over a mapping that did an update increased confidence tremendously. Resolving a support issue by getting sales and the sales consultant in the room built confidence that the sales team would still be there after the sale.
If they like you, and they believe in you, and they trust you, and they have confidence in you… then they may buy from you.
Summation, then questions. One more time, because it is the whole talk: people love to buy, but they hate to be sold.
I am applying to Palantir Warp Speed as a Forward Deployed Software Engineer. You pioneered the title. You asked for embed, measure, leave a path. This talk is the proof I already treated the plant as the person who pays me.
Dawn Foods: 8 hours to under 1. Micron fab, zero downtime. Mercedes +200%. Cargill oils plants. Horizon Milling, CFO Award. 19 of 20 crisis accounts. Then a 4070 so the same motion runs on agents. I want Foundry on the floor the same way Dawn wanted the next Informatica product — because they believed in the person in the room.