"I Love This Company" part one … and other thoughts

This past week was the annual sales conference of Microsoft, which was held this year in Atlanta.  Around 12,000 sales and marketing professionals, developers, and executives descend on the city for a series of keynotes, breakout tracks and events.  The “conference” goes back many years and is the highlight of the year coming after the FY(09) close and at the start of the FY10 year.  This is the event where you may have seen Steve Ballmer doing one of his high-energy talks on stages about “developers, developers, and developers” or even his part about “I love this company!!!!”.  This was my first and I will share some of the highlights and personal stories from the week.

(And I realize there is not much in this story about climbing and running – but I will touch on how it came to intersect one specific section.)

Many of us arrived on Saturday or Sunday to get ready for the keynotes and to get us and other speakers well prepared.  Many people also came direct from New Orleans where the annual Worldwide Partners Conference takes place with about 9,000 attendees – so people were pretty tired by the start.

On Tuesday was the big Communications Sector (our group) keynotes and tracks.  This was something that we have been planning for over two months now.  During that time, my boss moved on to heading Sales and Operations for Wipro in New Jersey and we got a new CVP: Austen Mulinder.  This meant we literally had to redo a lot of things several times to fit the new format and to get the messages right.

To start with, in the Keynote 1, we had to syncronize the three regional sales leads from Aus/Sing, US and EMEA/Norway to talk about the relevant items in their areas, keep it to 10 minutes and have the customer videos line up.  We were also on pressure with time because Austen’s boss (who runs a $20b+ business) had a hard-start time that we could not go over on.

We spent Sunday getting these right and went into some rehearsals on Monday morning.  We also had Keynote 2 which was largely Ralph (who runs Industry), his leads, and myself, to do in the middle of the day on Tuesday.  Finally, after some breakout tracks, the close was to Andy Lees (head of mobility – WindowsMobile, doing some never-before-seen demo’s of the integration between Xbox-live, windows phones, TV & Media Room, PC and OCS/Office 2010/Windows 7 with voice, video and photos all in a Live environment.

The highlights were that we were running on time for our keynotes on Tuesday until someone was late getting to stage – which meant the talent had to stretch the time, they did some audience cheers, which were – well – very ackward.  Then we went out of order and by the time Austen got on, his boss was ready.  They did an amazing re-do on-the-fly and hit the mark totally.

I was pretty nervous for my/our keynote knowing it was a bit of a coming out party and my first time on stage in this company.  The visuals came together at the last minute and I had time to do a number of personal rehearsals and with Ralph.

Bottom line: we did great!  I got lots of good feedback on the quality, comfort level, connection with audience and credibility.  Whew!

We launched our new social media website behindthreescreens.com and the groups new visual identity, solutions area bills of materials progress, PR plan and events strategy.

At the end of the day, Andy did this great great demo’s and Austen closed with some sincere messages and put on the “CS Channel” shirt we had designed with the stlylized “3″ on back (three screens and a cloud” – which worked out so well.

Afterwards, we brought drinks in to the ballroom and the mojitos never tasted so good!

The proof was in the scores.  Here, it is all about competition and transparency and our group had apparently not done so well last year.  But Austen’s close was in the top 10 (the only keynote to do so) and Ralph and myself were about 3.66/4 and 4.5/5 on the ratings, which beat most other groups.

I can’t begin to describe the level of relief at that moment which was just a reflection of the 100s of hours we had put into this and a ton of practice.

Finally, as the big-tent (Philips Arena) keynotes took place starting the next day, our sector is THE place for the company to focus on: service providers, solutions offering, software+services (cloud), tv, phone and mobile and about Comms Sector being THE channel to the market.   So many people put so much into this and it was really a proud team moment.

In my section, I talked about marathons on seven continents and summits completed and closed by saying that we would together climb the highest mountains together, and when we completed them, we would climb some more!  All together on the rope-line, common goals and celebrating our successes in the future!