Commodity chain Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Item chain - Essay Example The high thickness polythene is continually reused, where different items that have experienced their value are broken and the materials remolded to make new things. The mug as it includes basic assembling procedure of liquefying plastics and afterward remolding the plastic to frame the mug. This probably been made in a similar spot where the material was re-appropriated. This is additionally insisted by Media Federal (2011) who clarifies that the organization makers huge volumes of comparable item. It along these lines implies that the purifying and the embellishment were made at a similar plant; that is the Wei Mon industry co., Ltd. The plastic that is the fundamental crude material in the mug was in all probability sourced inside the nation for reusing or was either new plastic that was shaped in the organization to produce mugs. Taking into account that the industrial facility makes numerous comparative items as Media Federal (2011) clarifies, the plastic was undoubtedly new and had been shaped from crude materials. Plastics are made of polymers through a polymerization procedure. Most elements for polymerization are for the most part import ed from a few nations China and the U.S being pioneers in making these polymer materials (Harper, 714). The fixings to make the mug were in all probability purchased from China and the organization completed the polymerization procedure to get the polymers that were later utilized in assembling the mugs. ' The item is delivered through infusion forming. The molds were undoubtedly planned in the Wei Mon Industry co. and afterward used to complete infusion shaping as the principle procedure that the organization is associated with. The item along these lines included the utilization of effectively planned molds where liquid plastic was constrained through, and the mug shaped from the molds. The laborers in the process probably made extremely low wages. The mug requires the utilization of molds that are as a rule computerized, the human information is diminished to control

75 Synonyms for Hard

75 Synonyms for Hard 75 Synonyms for â€Å"Hard† 75 Synonyms for â€Å"Hard† By Mark Nichol It’s simple to expound on how hard something is, on the grounds that such a significant number of equivalents exist for that dubious word and its progressively formal cousin troublesome. A significant number of these terms are to some degree compatible (that’s why they call them equivalents), however and still, at the end of the day, the faculties are regularly marginally particular; do somewhat more research on use when you locate a promising variety for that theoretical (or is it recondite?) expressing you’re endeavoring to artfulness. 1. Dynamic: disassociation from a viable reference that would help in perception 2. Esoteric: troublesome in light of specialized contemplations 3. Exhausting: incredible physical effort 4. Augean: terribly, overwhelmingly hard (a traditional reference to the Augean corrals, cleaned by Hercules as one of his incredible twelve works) 5. Backbreaking: tiring and regularly demoralizing physical exertion 6. Wounding: truly wearing and harming 7. Ruthless: disagreeably troublesome 8. Oppressive: genuinely or sincerely troublesome 9. Testing: requiring uncommon exertion; may have a positive or a negative sense contingent upon setting 10. Complex: troublesome as a result of different interrelated variables 11. Muddled: see complex 12. Tangled: see complex; with an extra implication of curving or interlacing 13. Barbarous: set apart by inflexible trouble that dismisses the worker’s government assistance 14. Overwhelming: motivating a sentiment of incredible trouble 15. Requesting: reminiscent of an incredible duty of time and exertion 16. Upsetting: causing passionate anguish 17. Effortful: requiring exertion 18. Slippery: hard to appreciate, or hesitant 19. Demanding: requiring fastidious tender loving care, or requiring steady exertion 20. Debilitating: troublesome as far as physical or mental effort 21. Considerable: debilitating as a result of anticipated trouble; additionally has a positive implication of grandness 22. Baffling: creating sentiments of misery or destruction 23. Offensive: causing agony or languishing 24. Troubling: confirming steady trouble or seriousness; can likewise mean â€Å"grim,† â€Å"gloomy,† or â€Å"sinister† 25. Difficult (additionally spelled tiring): requiring tenacious or outrageous exertion 26. Bushy: troublesome (casual) 27. Brutal: too much troublesome 28. Overwhelming: including incredible exertion 29. Huge: reminiscent of incredible trouble 30. Barbaric: so troublesome as to appear past human ability 31. Insoluble: apparently too hard to possibly be tackled or settled 32. Scaring: so troublesome that the assignment or prospect rouses dread or sadness 33. Mind boggling: see complex 34. Included: see tangled 35. Knotty: see tangled 36. Toiled: requiring wearying physical or mental effort 37. Arduous: see toiled 38. Pitiless: set apart by exertion that is by all accounts required with no respect for the government assistance of the laborer 39. Moiling: requiring a lot of exertion 40. Deadly: reminiscent of danger of physical or mental damage (casual) 41. Difficult: see troublesome 42. Misty: troublesome as a result of an absence of clearness or correspondence 43. Abusive: brutally troublesome 44. Overpowering: too difficult to even think about doing or bear without misery 45. Difficult: causing physical or mental inconvenience or mischief 46. Pick-and-scoop: reminiscent of extraordinary manual exertion 47-48. Hazardous/problematical: trouble in tackling an issue 49. Rebuffing: trouble inconsiderate of outcomes of physical or mental strain 50. Recondite: hard to fathom due to haziness or the need to have more information 51. Unbending: rigidly troublesome 52. Thorough: trouble brought about by states of resoluteness or prerequisites of incredible accuracy 53. Rough: reminiscent of conditions requiring quality and endurance 54. Genuine: requiring a lot of exertion 55. Extreme: troublesome on account of the idea of prerequisites or requirements or as a result of the need to use extraordinary exertion 56. Barbed: packed with challenges 57. Sisyphean: reminiscent of persevering, monotonous work (an old style reference to Sisyphus, tormented in Hades by having to more than once roll a rock up a slope, at that point recover it when it moves down once more) 58. Solid: see unbending 59. Difficult: see burdensome 60. Unpleasant: so troublesome as to cause strain or anxiety 61. Severe: troublesome particularly on account of norms forced 62. Tough: see severe 63. Obstinate: determinedly troublesome 64. Sweat-soaked: reminiscent of extraordinary physical effort, causing sweat 65. Tall: see impressive (casual) 66. Burdening: see oppressive 67. Testing: calling for extraordinary exertion, as though to test one’s capacities 68. Prickly: see sharp 69. Sensitive: troublesome in view of the problem’s touchy nature 70. Tight: hard due to an absence of adaptability 71. Toilsome: see worked 72. Intense: genuinely or intellectually requesting (casual) 73. Dubious: see sensitive 74. Having a go at: requiring incredible perseverance 75. Tough: see toiled Need to improve your English in a short time a day? Get a membership and begin accepting our composing tips and activities every day! Continue learning! Peruse the Vocabulary classification, check our well known posts, or pick a related post below:50 Synonyms for â€Å"Leader†One Sheep, Two Sheep, One Fish, Two Fish . . .Intensifiers and Hyphens

CP10 Industry-Specific Cloud-Based CRM with Vlocity - Podcast with David Schmaier

CP10 Industry-Specific Cloud-Based CRM with Vlocity - Podcast with David Schmaier INTRODUCTIONMartin: Today, we are in talk with an entrepreneur who knows lots of stuff about bringing your business into a cloud. Hi David! Who are you and what do you do?David: Hi Martin! My name is David Schmaier and I am the CEO and founder of Vlocity â€" the first company to build multiple industry-specific applications on a Salesforce platform.Martin: Great. When did you start this company and what did you do before?David: We started this company two years ago in early 2014. Prior to this, I spent the last 27 years in the CRM software business mostly on a place one of the founders of the Siebel Systems.Martin: And how did you come up with idea of Vlocity?David: It’s a long story but I’ll try to give you the short version. I like to describe this that 28 years ago, my co-founder, Craig Ramsey, and I had also met Marc Benniof, who’s the founder of Salesforce and a guy named Thomas Siebel, who was the founder of Siebel Systems, so we all met in Oracle Corporation in the early 90’s when Oracle was about a 200 million dollar company. I had joined Oracle out of Harvard Business School because I thought it might be interesting to get into software business â€" it turned out to be very interesting to get into the software business. And I met Tom and Marc and Larry Ellison and a bunch of other people who became famous in the software business. And back then the worldwide market for CRM software was 20 million dollars globally. Today the worldwide market for CRM software is 20 billion dollars, so it turned out to be a pretty good idea.I left Oracle with Tom Siebel, as one of the founding executives for Siebel Systems and at Siebel Systems we built the company that, over 13 years, became a company of about 2 billion in revenue and eight thousand employees. We ultimately sold that company to Oracle â€" Oracle acquired Siebel in 2006. I thought I was done with the CRM software business forever but that turned out to not be true.Martin: Great, so what type of pr oblem did you identify once you’ve sold your last company that you said: “Oh, this is a problem that’s unsolved; I need to start another company or at least test some hypothesis called Vlocity”?David: Exactly! The idea for Vlocity came 3 years ago. I went to Dreamforce â€" which is the big Salesforce annual user meeting with about a hundred forty thousand people â€" and I ran into a lot of my old friends from the CRM business and what I saw in the Cloud Expo at Salesforce is: 3,000 companies that are built on the Salesforce platform, but none of them provided vertical or industry-specific applications. And so that was the opportunity. Companies today have a choice, they either buy an industry-specific applications which are typically on-premise or they buy Cloud for companies like Salesforce. And they have to choose Cloud or industry-specific, Cloud or industry-specific? What we believe is in the year 2016, you can have both â€" you should be able to have industry-specific a pplications in the cloud. We call that the industry cloud.Martin: And how did you start? Because right now, you have a bigger product portfolio of different kinds of applications for different industries. With what type of industry did you start?David: We picked the largest industries that required the maximum amount of industry-specific functionality. Each one of the industries that we’re in â€" and we’re in four of them â€" so telecommunications and media is one, our second is insurance, our third is health insurance and our fourth is government. We picked those for a couple of reasons:first, they’re really large markets,second of all, a recent survey came out and it picked those industries as four of the five worst industries in terms of customer service.And if you think about your personal experience when you deal with the government or when you deal with your telco provider, or when you deal with your insurance company; the service is not very good and the customer experi ence â€" it’s like getting your wisdom teeth pulled at the dentist.Martin: It’s not fun at all, yes.David: And so what we believe is that shouldn’t have to be true. That is could be an omni-channel experience that I might want to interact with my telco, let’s say, over the web, the web browser or maybe on my mobile phone and you might want to call your telco through contact center or any combination thereof. And when you go to the web or talk to the contact center or walk in the retail store, they actually know who you are, they say: “Hey! Hi Martin! How are you? How are your products working today, can I introduce you to these new offers?” And there are a personalized, tailored conversations to who you are and what you want and what kind of service they can provide.It sounds simple but most companies in these four industries can’t do it today. That’s what we do; we basically provide the enabling technology for them to have that conversation with their customers.Mart in: Great. David, can you walk us through the process of how you acquired the first customers? So, did you only use the Salesforce platform or did you go out and acquire the customers one by one? How did it go?David: That’s a great question. So we started the company and hired a development team to build these four products â€" so we built the products before we got our first customer. And the reason we built the product is we had built vertical applications for these same industries in our prior lab in Siebel. And so we already had some very good understanding of what people wanted in these four markets and we knew that they didn’t want the same thing that we built for them before, the world had changed some but they wanted similar functionality, modern functionality but now they wanted it in the cloud.So we built four of these industries, we built what â€" back then was Version One of our product â€" and we launched our company at Dreamforce â€" the annual Salesforce conferenc e and one of our biggest customers is a company called Sky Italia. So I met the CTO of Sky Italia at Dreamforce and they had just bought Salesforce and they were going to customize all the telecommunications capabilities themselves. And when I met the executive team, I talked to them and said we’ve already built all these customizations that you’re trying to do and they were surprised, they said: “Really you’ve already built this?” So we brought them over and showed it to them and 90 days later, they became a customer. So it’s a very large customer at the five thousand agent B2C contact centre on the Salesforce platform so that was a great customer win.Another one of our early wins was an insurance, in fact our first customer was an insurance, was a company called ABD Insurance. ABD Insurance is one of the top 100 insurance brokers in  North America and they took Vlocity insurance and ran live on it in 45 days, including back office integration, to automate their whole sales and service process for the customers.So that really talks to the agility that you can get with the industry cloud because we already have the industry functionality and because it’s all built in the Salesforce platform, you can deploy it very quickly and more importantly you can change it very quickly because your business changes and so we allow you to, kind of, modify the business processes, modify the user interface, modify the offers that you present to customers, modify your service approach and you can do it in a very agile fashion so you can be very nimble versus the old world of legacy applications that are brittle and hard-coded and very costly to change.Martin: And back then when you were on this Dreamforce conference, did you really look for specific people who you wanted to get in touch with and then just approach them and then pitch them your, kind of, products? Or was this just by accident that you ran into this CTO of Sky Italia?David: A little bit of both, t hat’s a good question. We went there to launch our company and we had a big presence at this conference and because there weren’t other industry-specific applications, we created a tradeshow booth in their exhibit hall that had very clear signs of â€" about our four industries so telecommunications signs, insurance and pictures of imagery of those verticals, government and health insurance. So that, in a way, naturally attracted everybody at that conference who was in those industries came by to look. That was one thing that we did.The second thing that we did was we tried to do an outreach either before the conference or during the conference to people that we knew were in those industries.Martin: Good.BUSINESS MODEL OF VLOCITYMartin: Let’s talk about the business model of Velocity. You talked about the kind of industries that you are trying to serve. Now the question is, what are the most effective sales or customer acquisition channels that you’re currently using?David: S ure. We deal a number of joint marketing activities with Salesforce, so they’re our number one partner and we built our applications on their platform. So for example: next week a guy named Mike Milburn who is the Head of Salesforce service cloud, and I are doing a webinar worldwide and we’re talking about how you move from legacy CRM to the industry cloud on the Salesforce platform. And we’re going to talk about a number of customer examples on how we have moved people from on-premise and legacy systems to the cloud. So I think there’s several hundred people already registered for that so that’s one example of a joint marketing program.We did a webinar like this a month ago with the CIO of Sky Italia talking about their   project and I think we had over 500 people register for that webinar, so it’s very successful. And what we find in the industries â€" this industry approach is it’s a reference selling business so we’re very, very focused â€" our top goal in the co mpany is customer service. So we’re in the customer service business and as we make these companies more efficient and more connected to their customers, they tell other companies in the industry about how Vlocity and Salesforce really changes the conversation of their customer so that’s why we do event like webinars or we also do executive events, we do direct marketing and go to tradeshows for all these different verticals.Martin: When I look at your business model, what popped out to my eyes was one thing that you’re partnering very nearly with Salesforce as a platform and also they invested some money into your business, and on the other hand, you’re using, I guess, some coinciding companies as a distribution channel and finally, Accenture also invested in the company. The investment from Salesforce, I can understand. What is the proposition of, let’s say, coinciding companies investing in tech companies? Is it something like they want to find a scalable way of using t hat kind of customer context because the coinciding business is not really scalable per se?David: Yes, it’s a pretty unique relationship that we’ve developed with Accenture, they don’t invest in that many technology companies, they invested in a few. But our view of this is that you have to look at the entire value proposition for the customer. So we sell our industry clouds to the small, medium and large companies but our big focus is on large companies. When you go to a large telecommunications company or a large insurance firm, these are big projects and so it’s very hard for us to scale teams around the world for these deployments and so if by working with Accenture, we can have global reach where we put a few people from Vlocity on our project but Accenture will run those projects and Accenture is the largest systems integrator on the Salesforce platform so they have a huge practice of what they call certified Salesforce consultants. And so our product is built 100% on Salesforce so we train the Accenture people and then we also go to market with them, and joint market with them in each one of these industries.So it’s actually a great relationship â€" they’ve invested in the company, one of their top executives is on my Board of Directors and we have a have synergistic relationship. Now, it’s not an exclusive relationship so we also work with Deloitte and IBM and the other systems integrators but we do have a particularly tight and close relationship with Accenture.Martin: Good. How is the pricing model working?David: Well, it works very well. What we do is we sell industry-specific modules on top of the Salesforce products. The Salesforce has, I think, now 7 clouds; sales cloud, marketing cloud, service cloud, communities cloud, etc. They have a price for each one of those and then we sell different modules on top, like our Vlocity communications product, our Vlocity insurance product, our Vlocity health insurance product, or Velocity publi c sector product.Martin: Is the pricing based on a per user base or just on a per company base or is like a SaaS model or…David: Yes, it’s a SaaS model. So we price, kind of, at a consistent way like how Salesforce prices. So the pricing is a price per user, per month. It’s a subscription fee for the software as a service.Martin: Great. You have lots of experience with raising money. So how did you think about going to investors and then what point in time did you talk to them?David: We were very fortunate in this regard. I think, to date, we’ve raised over 54 million dollars. Our original intention was myself and my co-founders were going to fund the company completely and in our very first meeting with Salesforce, it became clear that Salesforce wanted to invest in our company so they led a 43 million dollar equity investment so they led it and Accenture participated and I believe Salesforce’s investment was their second largest investment ever in a company like ours. So it’s a pretty sizable investment. So they’re our largest outside minority investor.Martin: David, what is your perspective on the future of the cloud businesses in general? Do you think the market is strongly growing, what type of trends can you identify?David: Yes, Martin. That’s a great question. In my professional opinion, a 100% of enterprise software will be in the cloud in the next 10 years. So the probability if you’re a CTO or CIO or CEO then all your systems will be running in the cloud or almost all of them is 100% and today I think maybe 10-15% of all enterprise software is in the cloud. So if you go from a 10-15% to 100%, that means there’s going to be a huge growth in the cloud. It’s basically all going into the cloud, it’s just simpler, better, more efficient, it’s more agile, the users are more successful with the cloud software and ultimately, it’ll cost you a lot less money. It’s just an amazing revelation in computing so that’s the first thin g: it’s all going to the cloud.And then, what we believe at Vlocity is it’s not just going to the cloud, it’s going to the industry cloud. Let me give you a couple of examples: If you’re an insurance company and I asked you: “Hey Martin â€" let’s say you run an insurance company â€" do you want it insured CRM or a generic CRM?” Most people in that industry will pick the software for their industry. The example I’ll give you is when you go to a men’s store to buy a suit, do you buy one off the rack that doesn’t really fit or do you buy one that’s tailored for you, that fits like a glove. Most people would rather have the tailored suit, well, the same thing’s true for business software which is people want software that’s tailored to their industry.And so we think that the industry cloud is the next wave, the cloud. And it’s a natural specialization of the cloud for telecommunications, for insurance, for health insurance, for every industry, this is going t o happen.Martin: I also believe that tailored products increase the relevancy for your customers but are your products very modular given even in a specific industry so that you can really tailor them to a specific customer or is it just a generic framework for a specific industry which is most of the time right?David: Yeah, it’s very modular and the, kind of, future of modern software is modular components. And so in each one of our industries, we actually have 5 or 10 products, it’s a family where you can pick and choose â€" you want the whole suite, or do you want this module or that module. And we can plug our modules into other software or people can buy the whole suite.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM DAVID SCHMAIERMartin: Let’s talk about your major learnings. So when you started Siebel and also Vlocity, what have been the do’s and don’ts when you think back and say: “Hmm, these are what people who are starting their first company should not do and these are who they should be focusing on”.David: I would say there’re three things that are really important in starting any company. So I’ll talk about the dos first then I’ll talk about the don’ts.Number one is hire the single best people that you know better, either really smart, really talented. I think most importantly in starting a company, people who have done this before, sometimes being smart is not enough, the experience really matters, because if you don’t have the experience, you waste time and when you waste time, you waste money. Recommendation number one is: hire the single best and most experienced team that you can, to start the company, that’s recommendation number one.Number two is there has to be what I’ll call product market fit. You have to be in a market that’s big enough to build a real company and a lot of, I think, start-ups fail because they go after like a little, tiny market and even if they’re successful, the company never really amounts to anything. S o it has to be a big enough market to be worth doing and the product market fit, part of it is that you have to build a product that’s well designed and attuned to that particular market. That’s very important, I think, that’s where a lot of the venture capitalists look at is the product market fit of your company. You might start with an initial idea and as you start working on your company and building your company, that might change in terms of what the product market fit really is. But that’s critically important, I think without the product market fit, it’s very difficult to have a successful company â€" that’s the second.And then, the third sounds obvious but it’s not so obvious is customer satisfaction. Particularly, when you’re a small company, every single customer has to succeed. Every customer’s a reference and the reference effect of your initial customers is every powerful. So our commitment when we talk to a new company like Sky or ABD or APN or other s is we will do whatever it takes to make the customer successful and whatever it takes is whatever it takes. So it’s very important to keep your entire company focused on the customer. So those are all the three things I’ve learned from my Siebel and now my Vlocity experience.Martin: Good. David, how do you find great talent and especially once people are interviewed for a position or so, when you’re talking with them, how do you really identify that they are great and not only good?David: Yes, I think there are several aspects of hiring. We surely look at people’s educational background and smarter, more talented people tend to go to better schools, not always true, but certainly good places to start so that’s the first one. The second one is experience as I talked about before so if you’re hiring a product manager, have they been a product manager before for this kind of software? Or for hiring a sales person you could say, okay how long have they been a sales person and how they did their sales numbers, did they beat their sales objectives or did they miss their sales objectives and we look for sales people that consistently beat their sales objectives. Those are two of the obvious things you look at â€" their educational background, their work experience.I think the final one is, kind of, the hardest but maybe the most important is are they hungry? People that are hungry to success they figure it out. They figure out what they need to do to be successful and you can have somebody that’s really smart and has went to the right schools and has the right experience but if they’re not hungry, it doesn’t really matter, that third one is intangible.I find its good to get multiple people to interview someone because people are complex and I find that my best people all interview a candidate and if 5 out of 5 of us really want to hire the person, then it’s probably a good hire. If three out of 5 of us want to hire the person or 4 out of 5, usua lly it’s not a good sign. Like if there’s some doubts there it’s better to hold off than to just do it because it’s all about the people and you know great people do amazing things and bad people or not so good people, not only do they not do amazing things, they sometimes make things worse.Martin: Great. What type of advice can you give for some entrepreneurs who think: “I don’t have a great business idea or at least I don’t believe it’s one. How can I find a great business idea?”.David: I don’t think that you simply have a great business idea pop in your head. I think the way you come across these ideas is you, kind of, stumble upon them. So you might working at a company and you’ll see something that isn’t done right and then maybe you’ll try to solve that problem at your company and you’ll realize that the way you’re solving that problem is a whole different company. I think a lot of people think that entrepreneurship solve is kind of like a lightni ng bulb just hits you and all of the sudden you know there’s this brand new idea. I think that’s the exception of the rule.I think it’s more likely that people are doing something as their daily work, they see something that isn’t being solved and then they come up with a way to solve it. These ideas just don’t materialize, you kind of bump into them through your daily course of work so that’s, kind of, one idea.The second thing i would say is building companies is incredibly fun, there’s incredible highs but there’s also incredible lows â€" takes a lot of work and a lot of hours. So my other piece of advice is do what you love otherwise to do something that spend these many hours and not loving it â€" that’s hard to deal. You got to pick something that you’re really passionate about and want to work on 100 hours a week.Martin: Great. David, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge.David: Martin, it was a pleasure, really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.T HANKS FOR LISTENING! Welcome to the 10th episode of our podcast!You can download the podcast to your computer or listen to it here on the blog. Click here to subscribe in iTunes. INTRODUCTIONMartin: Today, we are in talk with an entrepreneur who knows lots of stuff about bringing your business into a cloud. Hi David! Who are you and what do you do?David: Hi Martin! My name is David Schmaier and I am the CEO and founder of Vlocity â€" the first company to build multiple industry-specific applications on a Salesforce platform.Martin: Great. When did you start this company and what did you do before?David: We started this company two years ago in early 2014. Prior to this, I spent the last 27 years in the CRM software business mostly on a place one of the founders of the Siebel Systems.Martin: And how did you come up with idea of Vlocity?David: It’s a long story but I’ll try to give you the short version. I like to describe this that 28 years ago, my co-founder, Craig Ramsey, and I had also met Marc Benniof, who’s the founder of Salesforce and a guy named Thomas Siebel, who was the founder of Siebel Systems, so we all met in Oracle Corporation in the early 90’s when Oracle was about a 200 million dollar company. I had joined Oracle out of Harvard Business School because I thought it might be interesting to get into software business â€" it turned out to be very interesting to get into the software business. And I met Tom and Marc and Larry Ellison and a bunch of other people who became famous in the software business. And back then the worldwide market for CRM software was 20 million dollars globally. Today the worldwide market for CRM software is 20 billion dollars, so it turned out to be a pretty good idea.I left Oracle with Tom Siebel, as one of the founding executives for Siebel Systems and at Siebel Systems we built the company that, over 13 years, became a company of about 2 billion in revenue and eight thousand employees. We ultimately sold that company to Oracle â€" Oracle acquired Siebel in 2006. I thought I was done with the CRM software business forever but that turned out to not be true.Martin: Great, so what type of pr oblem did you identify once you’ve sold your last company that you said: “Oh, this is a problem that’s unsolved; I need to start another company or at least test some hypothesis called Vlocity”?David: Exactly! The idea for Vlocity came 3 years ago. I went to Dreamforce â€" which is the big Salesforce annual user meeting with about a hundred forty thousand people â€" and I ran into a lot of my old friends from the CRM business and what I saw in the Cloud Expo at Salesforce is: 3,000 companies that are built on the Salesforce platform, but none of them provided vertical or industry-specific applications. And so that was the opportunity. Companies today have a choice, they either buy an industry-specific applications which are typically on-premise or they buy Cloud for companies like Salesforce. And they have to choose Cloud or industry-specific, Cloud or industry-specific? What we believe is in the year 2016, you can have both â€" you should be able to have industry-specific a pplications in the cloud. We call that the industry cloud.Martin: And how did you start? Because right now, you have a bigger product portfolio of different kinds of applications for different industries. With what type of industry did you start?David: We picked the largest industries that required the maximum amount of industry-specific functionality. Each one of the industries that we’re in â€" and we’re in four of them â€" so telecommunications and media is one, our second is insurance, our third is health insurance and our fourth is government. We picked those for a couple of reasons:first, they’re really large markets,second of all, a recent survey came out and it picked those industries as four of the five worst industries in terms of customer service.And if you think about your personal experience when you deal with the government or when you deal with your telco provider, or when you deal with your insurance company; the service is not very good and the customer experi ence â€" it’s like getting your wisdom teeth pulled at the dentist.Martin: It’s not fun at all, yes.David: And so what we believe is that shouldn’t have to be true. That is could be an omni-channel experience that I might want to interact with my telco, let’s say, over the web, the web browser or maybe on my mobile phone and you might want to call your telco through contact center or any combination thereof. And when you go to the web or talk to the contact center or walk in the retail store, they actually know who you are, they say: “Hey! Hi Martin! How are you? How are your products working today, can I introduce you to these new offers?” And there are a personalized, tailored conversations to who you are and what you want and what kind of service they can provide.It sounds simple but most companies in these four industries can’t do it today. That’s what we do; we basically provide the enabling technology for them to have that conversation with their customers.Mart in: Great. David, can you walk us through the process of how you acquired the first customers? So, did you only use the Salesforce platform or did you go out and acquire the customers one by one? How did it go?David: That’s a great question. So we started the company and hired a development team to build these four products â€" so we built the products before we got our first customer. And the reason we built the product is we had built vertical applications for these same industries in our prior lab in Siebel. And so we already had some very good understanding of what people wanted in these four markets and we knew that they didn’t want the same thing that we built for them before, the world had changed some but they wanted similar functionality, modern functionality but now they wanted it in the cloud.So we built four of these industries, we built what â€" back then was Version One of our product â€" and we launched our company at Dreamforce â€" the annual Salesforce conferenc e and one of our biggest customers is a company called Sky Italia. So I met the CTO of Sky Italia at Dreamforce and they had just bought Salesforce and they were going to customize all the telecommunications capabilities themselves. And when I met the executive team, I talked to them and said we’ve already built all these customizations that you’re trying to do and they were surprised, they said: “Really you’ve already built this?” So we brought them over and showed it to them and 90 days later, they became a customer. So it’s a very large customer at the five thousand agent B2C contact centre on the Salesforce platform so that was a great customer win.Another one of our early wins was an insurance, in fact our first customer was an insurance, was a company called ABD Insurance. ABD Insurance is one of the top 100 insurance brokers in  North America and they took Vlocity insurance and ran live on it in 45 days, including back office integration, to automate their whole sales and service process for the customers.So that really talks to the agility that you can get with the industry cloud because we already have the industry functionality and because it’s all built in the Salesforce platform, you can deploy it very quickly and more importantly you can change it very quickly because your business changes and so we allow you to, kind of, modify the business processes, modify the user interface, modify the offers that you present to customers, modify your service approach and you can do it in a very agile fashion so you can be very nimble versus the old world of legacy applications that are brittle and hard-coded and very costly to change.Martin: And back then when you were on this Dreamforce conference, did you really look for specific people who you wanted to get in touch with and then just approach them and then pitch them your, kind of, products? Or was this just by accident that you ran into this CTO of Sky Italia?David: A little bit of both, t hat’s a good question. We went there to launch our company and we had a big presence at this conference and because there weren’t other industry-specific applications, we created a tradeshow booth in their exhibit hall that had very clear signs of â€" about our four industries so telecommunications signs, insurance and pictures of imagery of those verticals, government and health insurance. So that, in a way, naturally attracted everybody at that conference who was in those industries came by to look. That was one thing that we did.The second thing that we did was we tried to do an outreach either before the conference or during the conference to people that we knew were in those industries.Martin: Good.BUSINESS MODEL OF VLOCITYMartin: Let’s talk about the business model of Velocity. You talked about the kind of industries that you are trying to serve. Now the question is, what are the most effective sales or customer acquisition channels that you’re currently using?David: S ure. We deal a number of joint marketing activities with Salesforce, so they’re our number one partner and we built our applications on their platform. So for example: next week a guy named Mike Milburn who is the Head of Salesforce service cloud, and I are doing a webinar worldwide and we’re talking about how you move from legacy CRM to the industry cloud on the Salesforce platform. And we’re going to talk about a number of customer examples on how we have moved people from on-premise and legacy systems to the cloud. So I think there’s several hundred people already registered for that so that’s one example of a joint marketing program.We did a webinar like this a month ago with the CIO of Sky Italia talking about their   project and I think we had over 500 people register for that webinar, so it’s very successful. And what we find in the industries â€" this industry approach is it’s a reference selling business so we’re very, very focused â€" our top goal in the co mpany is customer service. So we’re in the customer service business and as we make these companies more efficient and more connected to their customers, they tell other companies in the industry about how Vlocity and Salesforce really changes the conversation of their customer so that’s why we do event like webinars or we also do executive events, we do direct marketing and go to tradeshows for all these different verticals.Martin: When I look at your business model, what popped out to my eyes was one thing that you’re partnering very nearly with Salesforce as a platform and also they invested some money into your business, and on the other hand, you’re using, I guess, some coinciding companies as a distribution channel and finally, Accenture also invested in the company. The investment from Salesforce, I can understand. What is the proposition of, let’s say, coinciding companies investing in tech companies? Is it something like they want to find a scalable way of using t hat kind of customer context because the coinciding business is not really scalable per se?David: Yes, it’s a pretty unique relationship that we’ve developed with Accenture, they don’t invest in that many technology companies, they invested in a few. But our view of this is that you have to look at the entire value proposition for the customer. So we sell our industry clouds to the small, medium and large companies but our big focus is on large companies. When you go to a large telecommunications company or a large insurance firm, these are big projects and so it’s very hard for us to scale teams around the world for these deployments and so if by working with Accenture, we can have global reach where we put a few people from Vlocity on our project but Accenture will run those projects and Accenture is the largest systems integrator on the Salesforce platform so they have a huge practice of what they call certified Salesforce consultants. And so our product is built 100% on Salesforce so we train the Accenture people and then we also go to market with them, and joint market with them in each one of these industries.So it’s actually a great relationship â€" they’ve invested in the company, one of their top executives is on my Board of Directors and we have a have synergistic relationship. Now, it’s not an exclusive relationship so we also work with Deloitte and IBM and the other systems integrators but we do have a particularly tight and close relationship with Accenture.Martin: Good. How is the pricing model working?David: Well, it works very well. What we do is we sell industry-specific modules on top of the Salesforce products. The Salesforce has, I think, now 7 clouds; sales cloud, marketing cloud, service cloud, communities cloud, etc. They have a price for each one of those and then we sell different modules on top, like our Vlocity communications product, our Vlocity insurance product, our Vlocity health insurance product, or Velocity publi c sector product.Martin: Is the pricing based on a per user base or just on a per company base or is like a SaaS model or…David: Yes, it’s a SaaS model. So we price, kind of, at a consistent way like how Salesforce prices. So the pricing is a price per user, per month. It’s a subscription fee for the software as a service.Martin: Great. You have lots of experience with raising money. So how did you think about going to investors and then what point in time did you talk to them?David: We were very fortunate in this regard. I think, to date, we’ve raised over 54 million dollars. Our original intention was myself and my co-founders were going to fund the company completely and in our very first meeting with Salesforce, it became clear that Salesforce wanted to invest in our company so they led a 43 million dollar equity investment so they led it and Accenture participated and I believe Salesforce’s investment was their second largest investment ever in a company like ours. So it’s a pretty sizable investment. So they’re our largest outside minority investor.Martin: David, what is your perspective on the future of the cloud businesses in general? Do you think the market is strongly growing, what type of trends can you identify?David: Yes, Martin. That’s a great question. In my professional opinion, a 100% of enterprise software will be in the cloud in the next 10 years. So the probability if you’re a CTO or CIO or CEO then all your systems will be running in the cloud or almost all of them is 100% and today I think maybe 10-15% of all enterprise software is in the cloud. So if you go from a 10-15% to 100%, that means there’s going to be a huge growth in the cloud. It’s basically all going into the cloud, it’s just simpler, better, more efficient, it’s more agile, the users are more successful with the cloud software and ultimately, it’ll cost you a lot less money. It’s just an amazing revelation in computing so that’s the first thin g: it’s all going to the cloud.And then, what we believe at Vlocity is it’s not just going to the cloud, it’s going to the industry cloud. Let me give you a couple of examples: If you’re an insurance company and I asked you: “Hey Martin â€" let’s say you run an insurance company â€" do you want it insured CRM or a generic CRM?” Most people in that industry will pick the software for their industry. The example I’ll give you is when you go to a men’s store to buy a suit, do you buy one off the rack that doesn’t really fit or do you buy one that’s tailored for you, that fits like a glove. Most people would rather have the tailored suit, well, the same thing’s true for business software which is people want software that’s tailored to their industry.And so we think that the industry cloud is the next wave, the cloud. And it’s a natural specialization of the cloud for telecommunications, for insurance, for health insurance, for every industry, this is going t o happen.Martin: I also believe that tailored products increase the relevancy for your customers but are your products very modular given even in a specific industry so that you can really tailor them to a specific customer or is it just a generic framework for a specific industry which is most of the time right?David: Yeah, it’s very modular and the, kind of, future of modern software is modular components. And so in each one of our industries, we actually have 5 or 10 products, it’s a family where you can pick and choose â€" you want the whole suite, or do you want this module or that module. And we can plug our modules into other software or people can buy the whole suite.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS FROM DAVID SCHMAIERMartin: Let’s talk about your major learnings. So when you started Siebel and also Vlocity, what have been the do’s and don’ts when you think back and say: “Hmm, these are what people who are starting their first company should not do and these are who they should be focusing on”.David: I would say there’re three things that are really important in starting any company. So I’ll talk about the dos first then I’ll talk about the don’ts.Number one is hire the single best people that you know better, either really smart, really talented. I think most importantly in starting a company, people who have done this before, sometimes being smart is not enough, the experience really matters, because if you don’t have the experience, you waste time and when you waste time, you waste money. Recommendation number one is: hire the single best and most experienced team that you can, to start the company, that’s recommendation number one.Number two is there has to be what I’ll call product market fit. You have to be in a market that’s big enough to build a real company and a lot of, I think, start-ups fail because they go after like a little, tiny market and even if they’re successful, the company never really amounts to anything. S o it has to be a big enough market to be worth doing and the product market fit, part of it is that you have to build a product that’s well designed and attuned to that particular market. That’s very important, I think, that’s where a lot of the venture capitalists look at is the product market fit of your company. You might start with an initial idea and as you start working on your company and building your company, that might change in terms of what the product market fit really is. But that’s critically important, I think without the product market fit, it’s very difficult to have a successful company â€" that’s the second.And then, the third sounds obvious but it’s not so obvious is customer satisfaction. Particularly, when you’re a small company, every single customer has to succeed. Every customer’s a reference and the reference effect of your initial customers is every powerful. So our commitment when we talk to a new company like Sky or ABD or APN or other s is we will do whatever it takes to make the customer successful and whatever it takes is whatever it takes. So it’s very important to keep your entire company focused on the customer. So those are all the three things I’ve learned from my Siebel and now my Vlocity experience.Martin: Good. David, how do you find great talent and especially once people are interviewed for a position or so, when you’re talking with them, how do you really identify that they are great and not only good?David: Yes, I think there are several aspects of hiring. We surely look at people’s educational background and smarter, more talented people tend to go to better schools, not always true, but certainly good places to start so that’s the first one. The second one is experience as I talked about before so if you’re hiring a product manager, have they been a product manager before for this kind of software? Or for hiring a sales person you could say, okay how long have they been a sales person and how they did their sales numbers, did they beat their sales objectives or did they miss their sales objectives and we look for sales people that consistently beat their sales objectives. Those are two of the obvious things you look at â€" their educational background, their work experience.I think the final one is, kind of, the hardest but maybe the most important is are they hungry? People that are hungry to success they figure it out. They figure out what they need to do to be successful and you can have somebody that’s really smart and has went to the right schools and has the right experience but if they’re not hungry, it doesn’t really matter, that third one is intangible.I find its good to get multiple people to interview someone because people are complex and I find that my best people all interview a candidate and if 5 out of 5 of us really want to hire the person, then it’s probably a good hire. If three out of 5 of us want to hire the person or 4 out of 5, usua lly it’s not a good sign. Like if there’s some doubts there it’s better to hold off than to just do it because it’s all about the people and you know great people do amazing things and bad people or not so good people, not only do they not do amazing things, they sometimes make things worse.Martin: Great. What type of advice can you give for some entrepreneurs who think: “I don’t have a great business idea or at least I don’t believe it’s one. How can I find a great business idea?”.David: I don’t think that you simply have a great business idea pop in your head. I think the way you come across these ideas is you, kind of, stumble upon them. So you might working at a company and you’ll see something that isn’t done right and then maybe you’ll try to solve that problem at your company and you’ll realize that the way you’re solving that problem is a whole different company. I think a lot of people think that entrepreneurship solve is kind of like a lightni ng bulb just hits you and all of the sudden you know there’s this brand new idea. I think that’s the exception of the rule.I think it’s more likely that people are doing something as their daily work, they see something that isn’t being solved and then they come up with a way to solve it. These ideas just don’t materialize, you kind of bump into them through your daily course of work so that’s, kind of, one idea.The second thing i would say is building companies is incredibly fun, there’s incredible highs but there’s also incredible lows â€" takes a lot of work and a lot of hours. So my other piece of advice is do what you love otherwise to do something that spend these many hours and not loving it â€" that’s hard to deal. You got to pick something that you’re really passionate about and want to work on 100 hours a week.Martin: Great. David, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge.David: Martin, it was a pleasure, really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.T HANKS FOR LISTENING!Thanks so much for joining our 10th podcast episode!Have some feedback you’d like to share?  Leave  a note in the comment section below! If you enjoyed this episode, please  share  it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post.Also,  please leave an honest review for The Cleverism Podcast on iTunes or on SoundCloud. Ratings and reviews  are  extremely  helpful  and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and we read each and every one of them.Special thanks  to David for joining me this week. Until  next time!

All No Boy By John Okada - 1246 Words

What does it mean to be American? Do you have to be born in the country or just hold loyalty in your heart to the â€Å"land of the free and the home of the brave†? In John Okada’s novel No-No Boy, these questions are repeatedly asked, exposing the varying patriotism among the different ages of Japanese-Americans. The main character, Ichiro Yamada, struggles with trying to recover his lost American identity while also defying his parents’ differing ideals. Throughout the book, he resents his parents for convincing him to put Japan over his own homeland, by his refusal to be drafted into the Army. â€Å"†¦when the war came and they told me to fight for America, I was not strong enough to fight you and I was not strong enough to fight the bitterness†¦show more content†¦Their selfish purpose for moving to America was to seek riches that they could bring back to Japan. Once thy realized that the â€Å"American Dream† was merely an illusion, the y still refused to appreciate the resources and opportunities that America was realistically able to offer. Ichiro describes his contempt concerning the older generation’s trepidation to accept American culture and lifestyle. â€Å"They continued to maintain their dreams by refusing to learn how to speak or write the language of America and by living only among their own kind and by zealously avoiding long term commitments such as the purchase of a house† (25-26). Not only do Ichiro’ parents personally reject the American life, but they also attempt to isolate their children from that life as well. Ichiro’s mother would not allow radio, a record player, or any other item representing American culture, in her house. â€Å"All she wanted from America for her sons was an education, learning and knowledge which would make them better men in Japan. To believe that she expected that such a thing was possible for her sons without their acquiring other American tastes and habits and feelings was hardly possible and, yet, that is how it was† (205). The parents and their generation believed that the younger generation had to choose between being Japanese or being American and not both. Ichiro’s mother’s approval of him stems from whether or not she considers him to be her version of

Maintaining a Healthy Weight - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 2 Words: 576 Downloads: 1 Date added: 2019/08/16 Category Health Essay Level High school Tags: Weight Loss Essay Did you like this example? Maintaining a healthy weight should be a very big concern for everyone. Obesity is defined as any individual that weighs over thirty or more above their recommended optimum weight. The epidemic of obesity is sweeping across America and reflecting in our children. Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Maintaining a Healthy Weight" essay for you Create order Thats why its only makes sense that weight loss and weight loss solutions have become more of a common topic to discussion all across households in America. In 1999-2000, over 10% of preschool children between the ages of 2 and 5 were overweight, up from 7% in 1994. In addition, approximately 15.3% of children (ages 6–11) and 15.5% of adolescents (ages 12–19) were overweight in 2000. An additional 15% of children and 14.9% of adolescents were at a higher level of risks for becoming overweight based on their current Body Mass Index (BMI) results. The percentage of children and adolescents considered overweight has more than doubled since the early 1970s. A great amount of studies shows an increase in mortality rates associated with obesity. People who are obese have up to 10% to 50% increased risk of death from all causes when compared to others with a healthy weight level. A larger portion of the increased risk are due to cardiovascular diseases. Obesity caused additional 112,000 deaths per year in the United States when compared to others in the United States that maintains a healthy weight level. There are some typical diseases that are associated with people who are overweight and/or obese: Diabetes, Coronary heart disease and stroke, High blood cholesterol, Metabolic syndrome, Hypertension, Different types of cancer such as: (breast, colorectal, endometrial and kidney), Sleep apnea and other breathing problems, Osteoarthritis (degeneration of cartilage and bone of joints), Gallbladder disease, Fatty liver disease, Gout, Pregnancy complications, Menstrual irregularities, Hirsutism (presence of excess body and facial hair), Stress incontinence (urine leakage caused by weak pelvic floor muscles), Psychological disorders, such as depression, Increased surgical risk and Increased mortality. So knowing this, thats why one should be conscious of their weight and take active measures to maintain a healthy life. The first important thing to do is making the appropriate lifestyle changes, and that is achieving their fitness goals. However, the second important thing is obtaining their optimum weight level. So in order to become successful in achieving their optimum weight, they need to understand that there are fundamental changes that need to be made in relation to nutrition, exercise, rest and relaxation. It is very important to understand that achieving optimum health is a lifelong endeavor and not a short-term commitment. The goal is to lose the weight the right way. And its plenty of websites and articles that will provide individuals with countless of tips on how to achieve their proper weight loss goals correctly. Many individuals lack the knowledge to effectively do this on their own. I personally recommend individuals to do research and read articles and search websites to enhance their education relevant to the various weight loss approaches, techniques, and lifestyle changes necess ary to achieving their weight loss goals. In conclusion, you will not lose weight without improving the quality of foods that you put into your body. Those aspects present their own challenges, and in many cases require dedication and a change in overall lifestyle. Yes losing weight can be very difficult for the most part, but you must always remember that effort and changes in lifestyle will pay off in the end. Achieving and maintaining your personal weight goal is a life-changing event that will improve virtually all aspects of your life.

Newgen Case - 758 Words

Issues at NEWGEN In this case study, a manager named Abdul has to deal with one of his subordinate named Hahn Chen who problem working along with another colleague has named Amie Lee. Chen wishes to be transfer and report directly to Abdul instead of Ms. Lee because Ms. Lee is not a technical supervisor. This is typical problem between employees that happens often in a working environment. A problem like this often helps demonstrate conflict managing and how good a manager is. The problem Abdul face covers many areas of organizational behavior such as conflict and negotiation, organizational change and stress management, communication, personality and values. One of theories that are covered in this case is resistance of change.†¦show more content†¦Lee position because she does well with many other people. As for Hahn Chen, I would respect his wish but I will only grant him part of his wish. I think it is unwise to transfer Hahn Chen because he is a good software engineer and he is valuable to the team, however I would allow him to report directly to Abdul. On a different scenario, because Abdul is concentrating on the new product development after the promotion of Ms. Lee, he might be too busy to have Chen report directly to him. In this case, I would call up the software engineering team and pick out a person. This person will be someone who is good at communication and able to explain technical things for the nontechnical people. This person will be act as a bridge between the software engineering team and Ms. Lee in order to remedy the situation between Ms. Lee and Chen and also prevent future problem likeShow MoreRelatedThe Uk And London Are The Home Of Global Menswear3235 Words   |  13 Pagesindicated by Rush and others in video quoted above, both seem to refer the British nation as distinctively British phenomena. Between April and October 2014 the Museum of London held the exhibition NEWGEN MEN. Based on the initiative of the British Fashion Council and sponsored by TOPMAN, the biannual NEWGEN MEN award was established to promote and support upcoming menswear designer in Britain (The British Fashion Council 2014). The Museum of London selected six of them to showcase their latest collectionsRead MoreTopshop Company Profile Essay6285 Words   |  26 Pageslaunched their online store as well as joining forces with NEWGEN, where they help up and coming fashion designers by providing them a space to show their catwalk as well as connections with media and funding towards their collection. This partnership with NEWGEN is ongoing and integral to the brand, it gives Topshop fashion credulity as well as allowing collocations with high end, well known fashion designers that were originally part of NEWGEN, Christopher Kane, Mary Kantrantzou and Mathew WilliamsonRead MoreApplied Research Method - Paper 4023 Words   |  17 Pagesproduced products entirely different from the rest of the competitors on the basis of ideas and now they enjoy the biggest market share. According to Argyris (1985), ideas might address errors and are used for this purpose in organization. In such a case, correction or systematic corrections occurred which is a response to that idea in a form of learning. Addressing errors can minimize the problems in the management and solutions will be readily available. In this matter, the ideas play a criticalRead More_x000C_Introduction to Statistics and Data Analysis355457 Words   |  1422 PagesHugel Art Director: Vernon Boes Print Buyer: Karen Hunt Permissions Editor: Isabel Alves Production Service: Newgen–Austin Text Designer: Stuart Paterson Photo Researcher: Gretchen Miller Copy Editor: Nancy Dickson Illustrator: Jade Myers; Newgen–India Cover Designer: Stuart Paterson Cover Image: Paul Chesley/Getty Images Cover Printer: Courier Corporation/Kendallville Compositor: Newgen–India Printer: Courier Corporation/Kendallville  © 2008, 2005 Duxbury, an imprint of Thomson Brooks/Cole, a

Management Perspectives Social Responsibilities of the Businessman

Question: Describe about the Management Perspectives for Social Responsibilities of the Businessman. Answer: Introduction A management perspective is very important to manage the roles in an organization. It helps to give direction to the individuals and supervise how they perform the tasks. The management perspective also concentrates on the allocation of the task and manages the resources in a proper way. In order to make the daily decision, it is important to consider management perspective (Hossain et al., 2014). The personal development is very essential for an individual to become more appealing for the employers and the customers. It helps an individual to dig deep and recognize the contribution that they generate in the organization. A personal strength is an asset to an individual and it is used in a way that helps to differentiate an individual from others. Personal strengths help to improve the ability to utilize the skills in a more efficient manner. A personal weakness gives an area of opportunity for growth. The growth gives an opportunity to improve the skills in the existing jobs. A personal opportunity acts as a possibility that helps to enhance the knowledge of an individual (Hollensen, 2015). The Use of Three Naturally Occurring Data The use of conversation can be used to build a personal SWOT Analysis. With the help of conversation, I will be able to acknowledge the thoughts of the stakeholder. Conversation will help to get actual feedback from my colleagues that will help me to overcome the weakness. I will be able to have well a persuaded operational strategy. Conversation will also help me to think about my strength in relation to the people around me. My strength will turn into opportunities with the help of this naturally occurring data (Stanley Rebecca, 2016). The use of emails can also help to build the outer layer that consists of skills. The customers to provide a feedback for the goods that they use mainly use emails. However, the customer provides the feedback depending on the behavior of the sales executive and how their complaints are handled by the sales executive. With the help of the emails, I will be able to acknowledge about my weaknesses. In other words, I will be able to know about my communication skill and my customer handling potential (Groza et al., 2016). The use of artifacts can also help to identify the personal strength and weaknesses. The goods that are sold by the company should be such that the customers get pleased. With the help of the artifacts, the company the customers will be able to give the feedback that will help me to identify my strength and weaknesses (Howbert et al., 2014). Assessment of Personal Swot Analysis In order to conduct a personal SWOT Analysis, it is important to focus on the questions that need to be examined. After a person has defined his career ambition and aim, the next step will be to understand more about himself and his external environment. In that case, it is very important to conduct a SWOT Analysis to determine the strength, weakness, opportunities and threats (Shinoj, 2016). The SWOT Analysis helps to capture the information about the internal strengths and weaknesses and the external opportunities and threats. Strength: A personal strength will help me to differentiate myself from others when trying to get hold of the next promotion. Currently, I am working in Woolworths, as a Sales Executive and the feedback that I have got from others are that I have strong executive leadership characteristics. As a result, I have the ability to support and promote the Speedy Service Development. I also have positive personal personality that will help me to highlight the significance of employee motivation for organizational success. I am also very creative and as a result, I am able to influence the customers with a point of view of a particular good. I also have the ability to ask some important questions to the customers in order to discover what the customer exactly requires. The feedback that have got also includes the fact that I am able to identify the point of selling that makes the product of my company to stand out from the crowd. I am able to perform the identification of the products in a be tter manner as compared to others (Young et al., 2016). Weakness: A personal weakness is a responsibility or an area of opportunity for development. These characteristics will help me to improve upon to enhance the future opportunities. The weakness that I possess is that I rarely do something just out of sheer inquisitiveness. The feedbacks that I received from my colleagues are that I feel uncomfortable in speaking in front of the groups. I also have a weakness that indulge me to complete my work quickly so that I can add this in my to do list. As a result, I suffer from the results. I also get nervous while presenting the goods to the customers (Mich et al., 2014). Opportunities: I need to enhance myself as a Sales Executive and as a result, I need to receive coaching in service of improving my sales executive skills. I need to undergo some training so that I can also deal with the revenue-producing department. I also need to have a brief knowledge about the employee morale so that I can avoid low employee morale from taking place. I will also be able to employ and attract quality employees by replacing the weak performers. If I overcome my weaknesses, I will be able to improve my corporate culture and institutionalize procedures to create constancy (Zengping Xiangling, 2012). Threats: One of the major threats is the huge number of everyday demand that comprises against self-reflection. The threat that I feel I might undergo is that the changing professional standard that I will not be able to meet. The technologies are advancing with each passing day. As a result, I need to be up to date about the technologies so that I do not feel awkward (McDonald, 2013). Critical Assessment The most important responsibility being a sales executive is to sell the products properly and involve fast moving consumer goods. I feel that I am placed properly in the company as the company has helped me to learn many things. The company has done justice to my qualification and helped to gain confidence. I have also gained excellent interpersonal skills. As a sales executive, I listen to the requirements of the customers and try to maintain and enhance the relationship with the existing customers. However, sometimes I did face some bad experience that made me think that I was misplaced (Kotler et al., 2015). At the beginning, I had very limited interpersonal skills. I was not able to respond properly to the incoming email and phone enquiries. This made me feel de motivated however; Woolworths gave me a second chance to develop my interpersonal skills. As a result, I have developed my skills as sales executive and I am able to create comprehensive documents of the proposals. This is also helping me to demonstrate and present the goods to the customers in a proper way. As a sales executive, I am able to endorse the products and the services to the customers with the aim of maximizing the profits (Bowen, 2013). Before joining Woolworths I tried in a different organization, however, I was not given the opportunity to utilize my skills, as the work structure was limited. However, after joining Woolworths I have learned how to maintain a database built CRM that helps the organization to convert leads into prospects. I have acknowledged about self-management that is a concrete element in sales. With the help of this, I am able to know about the details about the goods in the company. I am able to prospect and convert the prospect to a customer. Woolworths has also helped me to improve my communication and maintain discipline (Mariadoss et al., 2014). I feel that I am placed in the organization as I have gained the knowledge that sales do not end once the product is sold. It is very important to remain in touch with the customers even after the product is sold. It is also important to handle the primary complaints of the customers at the sales executive level. The company has also given me training on how to handle the complaints of the customers properly (Knight et al., 2014). Self-Improvement for Continuous Improvement As a sales executive, I really need to overcome the above-mentioned weaknesses, as it will work as an obstacle in my career. This will help to provide a good knowledge to the employees regarding how to behave ethically. This is mainly because, Woolworths follows a strict code of conduct. I also have the feedback of having a weak communication skill. However, director of the sales executive department of Woolworths said that a good inter-personal communication skill is required for the success of the organization. Hence, I really need to focus on the improvement of my communication skill. This will help me to provide a good customer service. I need to closely identify my weaknesses in order to recognize my opportunities for a better service. I have a habit of being a debater, which directs me in a wrong way. I need to overcome this weakness as it might act as an obstacle while communicating with the customers. However, I am passionate about my work I sometimes end up indulging in a debate with my customers when they complain about the products. However, I need to overcome this problem, as it will have an impact on my reputation. I also have the habit of getting nervous around people that is mainly because I try to prove a good sales executive. However, the nervousness proves to be a challenge for me as I fail to deal properly with the customers. In order to improve, I need to gain practical knowledge and self-assurance about the work I am doing. I need to have a clear vision about the objectives. As a result, in order to improve I need to have a friendly persuasion so that I have the ability to convince customers and the clients to purchase the products. This will help me to gain the confidence without compromising the ability to be credible. The area of improvement also includes having the negotiation quality particularly when the goods are highly priced. I need to learn the art of negotiation without compromising high overall sales (Lee, 2016). Conclusion It can be concluded that Woolworths had helped me to develop my skills as sales executive and I am able to create comprehensive documents of the proposals. Conversation will help to get actual feedback from my colleagues that will help me to overcome the weakness. In order to recognize my opportunities for a better service I need to identify my weaknesses closely. After joining Woolworths, I have learned how to maintain a database built CRM that helps the organization to convert leads into prospects. The threat that has been concluded after conducting personal SWOT Analysis is that I feel the changing professional standard will have an impact on my performance. References Bowen, H. R. (2013).Social responsibilities of the businessman. University of Iowa Press. Groza, M. D., Locander, D. A., Howlett, C. H. (2016). Linking thinking styles to sales performance: The importance of creativity and subjective knowledge.Journal of Business Research. Hollensen, S. 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