A small about of time in the office this week at couple of days with 20k steps completed, meaning this week has been a week of energy and motivation.

This is week number 16 (4 months) of me writing up weeknotes, it’s been challenging at times but I’m still getting value from it so I will continue to do it. I’ll write up a bit more on this in a blog post next week but see below for some ideas I have to change up the format of this a little in future weeks.

What I’ve been doing

This week starting with our annual sales kick-off on Monday with me not only getting to sit and listen to all the amazing initiatives and updated compensation plans but also to present on some specific products and roadmap we’re working on and to answer questions. I love collaborating with sales folks because it really makes you answer those fundamental customer questions like “what’s the business value of this?”, “how does this thing work with X?” and “how does this product compare with X that I already have?”. It sounds basic but you’d be surprised how many struggle to articulate answers to these well.

I may have said on these weeknotes before that I do get some energy and motivation from being around and talking to people, but I am glad it was only one day (I am a true ambivert!)

I also got to participate is a great sales retrospective this week. As I mentioned in the past couple of weeknotes, I had been working on a very large bid proposal. There are always lessons learnt out of these things but there is one truth to them all - we should always be as quick and easy to do business with as possible. If it takes us weeks to response (even if that’s the timeline) then it’s not really a good look. I look forward to doing more of these and thinking more about tooling in this space that could help.

On a more technical note this week, I’ve been experimenting with writing some scripts to start gathering OSINT on customers (and potential customers). One of the hardest problems in managed services is getting all the technical information from a customer in order to know what services to sell to whom. Relationship building and P2P contact will only get you so far, in bigger organisations your contacts might not even know everything going on. Working smarter, not harder.

What I’ve been thinking about

With one of my previous employers Mimecast releases their new Human Risk Management platform it makes me think more about the scope of this idea. Most of the industry is focused on training or identify risk like DLP. What if we went a bit further and we took the pentesting approach? What if the person was the asset and their available information (via OSINT techniques) were vulnerabilities?

What I’ve been watching

This week my ad-hoc watching has mostly been about one topic - Robots!

What else

Well I’m thinking about a few changes to future weeknotes merges the “doing” and “thinking” sessions here. I also think the “listening” and “reading” are likely to move to their own /links sections of this site and “watching” and “real life” sections moving to /now. I’m not sure yet if this will make them more concise or more long-form - it’s been an experiment from the start so we’ll have to see.