A famous saying attributed to George Santayana states, “Those who don’t learn from history are certainly doomed to repeat it”. Santayana’s philosophy about history applies in many aspects of our collective and individual lives, and it especially applies to our business world, where so many micro-histories are written day in and day out.
Every day, thousands of companies implement the latest technology in the expectation that like “magical pixie-dust” it will instantly improve their business performance to a world class level. When this improvement doesn’t come, they look for more “technology pixie-dust” to fix the problem.
From my point of view, the issue is not with the technology, when implemented optimally, it will do what we want it to do. The problem I see is that we go about implementing and adopting technology into our organizations without leveraging all the lessons learned from thousands of implementations, the micro-histories that got us to today.
I am launching Opteus with the simple vision to move business at the speed of smart; to learn from our collective history and actively apply those lessons learned to quickly yield excellent results.
Learning is an empty process unless we apply the lessons learned to our day-to-day work. We are certainly growing technologically, but more frequently than we care to admit, we struggle to deliver on the promise of powerful technologies like ERP and CRM.
Often companies struggle with technology implementations because they didn’t address the fundamental business processes that were causing problems. They struggle because they think their business challenges are unique and require complex, tedious and lengthy analysis, when in fact their problems are common across most companies and should be easy to solve.
If history tells us where 80% of a complete solution for a business problem is, why would we not start improving our performance from there? If that solution combines technology with successfully tested practices, why would we not start using that solution rather than creating an expensive, complex, custom solution?
My passion is optimizing sales organizations so that sales professionals sell effectively, crushing quotas and goals. Opteus will help companies do this by delivering lessons learned over twenty years of successful sales and sales operations experience and implementing them using CRM technology as the hub.
I am not repeating history because I am learning from it. I am learning from both the mistakes that I have made – and those I have seen others make. I’ve certainly learned how to drive change quickly and effectively to make sales teams more successful, and as I grow Opteus, I look forward the opportunity to share those lessons learned with you.
So let’s get started on something great together.