Welcome one and all, to the Polygo Webinar Series, around motivation tools, collaboration, and knowledge. I'm your host today. My name is Andrea Chitta. I'm a customer success manager here at Paligo. We have three awesome speakers in the room for our second episode of the webinar series. The topic is, rapid online transition, embracing cloud tools, and good office chairs. We have with us Daphne Costa Lopez. She's the manager of, customer success in Mia at Upspot. Abspot is the leading, growth platform with thousands of customers around the world, that allows companies of all sizes to grow better whether they need the marketing automation CRM or support platform. Welcome, Daphne. Hi, Andrea. Sir Miguel Vieira, he's a founder or CEO at Truhuh. Truhuh, Truhuh, uses new technologies such as three d tours, agreemented reality and makes it easier for, users to understand the the their ideal, real estate property whether they want by or rent. Welcome Sergio. AM. And finally, we have Monica White. She's a senior technical writer at it. Identity automation. Identity automation is a leading provider for, identity and access management, helping enterprise customers, streamlined security, limiting risk, from data and network bridges. Welcome morning. Thank you, Andrea. It's great to be here. We all work in, in the software space, in the IT space. So you know, the adoption of cloud tools and working remotely, it's something that comes natural to all of us whether it's a big, huge organization, international organizations up such an up spot with, you know, employees in in what? Four or five continents. I don't know. Sergio is, you know, it's much smaller organization. It's a startup you're based in Barcelona, but you have colleagues in the Ukraine and everywhere else. Ukraine and London and the other side of Spain, there's at least six locations. Monica, I think you you also have a quite dispersed team. Right? So you're based in Texas, but, you you work remotely across different cities Correct. We've got less than two hundred peep fewer than two hundred people in the company, and there are people in Utah, North Carolina, I mean, all over the country. And, I think my my previous manager actually worked from outside of the country for a little while. And, so I mean, it's it's always been very flexible though. It's earned as a small company and kind of I mean, it's not huge, but we've got footprint as it were. So we're we're lucky in a way I would say. Right? But there is a lesson maybe or or or some tips that we can give to other businesses in other industries that are not cloud ready. They're not in software, for example. Thinking about hospitalization and restaurants and, you know, or other business manufacturing, for example, they had to to to stop all of the activities. I think one of the messages is that there is a another way of doing the job that you do, even if you're confined working from home in your apartment, You just have to, you know, maybe change your setup a little bit, use the right tool and, and communicate and, you know, have have the procedure in place in order to make sure that you you can can also continue with business as usual, even in a moment like this, you know, nobody knows how long it's gonna last. Right? The first question that I have for you is what's, new digital tools have and processes have been introduced in your organization to to work better together, remotely. If I go first. In HubSpot, we were very, remote ready, as an organization. So we haven't really introduced any new, work management tools because we used them all before. Obviously, we were using them much more now in a different way. But we introduce some fun tools into into our toolbox. So for example, all of the stuff that we would have done with our teams like social events, they have now gone remote. So we've become master of quizzes and, after work drinks on Zoom. Yeah, what are what are the cool things that we're using now is Kahoot, which is a game tool that you can, play quizzes on. That's really cool. I've been using Kahoot in one of my previous experience, and I think gamification, it's, it's very important, you know, to keep the engagement of the team and to to make it fun, to work, to work remotely. So that's a good point to definitely make there as well, being a a startup. We're already sort of geared in in the cloud. Everything was already online if you like. So we didn't really introduce any new tools as much. But what we did find is that we needed to when we normally have meetings, I would normally be on a whiteboard, and that would be brainstorming with the team about how we're going to solve specific problems. And what I noticed when I went into essentially the Zoom meetings that we all now have on a daily basis, is that my tool was taken away from me that I used to most express myself. So I needed to find a new way to to engage and perhaps the only new tool that we engaged with to change the, in any way, was Miro, which is essentially just a dashboarding tool. It's a whiteboard, a giant whiteboard that you can doodle on. So I just transferred the way I would have the meetings and how we would talk about points we want to address there. And it very quickly sort of got gamified very similarly to how Daphne mentioned, that you do it in a social way. You'd come back to a team meeting and there would be a few knots and crosses battles that happened in the corner of the meeting there and a few small points like that, which is always sort of my to see the team keeping those spirits up, you know? Monica, what is your, experience is there any tools, any new tools that have been added to the stack in your organization to to manage the team remotely and to collaborate together? Well, I've been thinking about this since he sent out the questions and, like, Sergio says we're mostly we're basically remote ready anyway. A significant portion of our our employees are already remote a hundred percent. And so we just already had it in their company culture every time there's a meeting, make sure you have a Google Hangouts link in there, and make sure that you've talked to everybody that needs to be in there regardless of where they are. So it wasn't just get a conference room and set a time. It's send links and whatnot. And all of our suite of tools really haven't changed that much. But like Daphne says, we're starting to do the the virtual happy hours instead of, okay, let's go to the bar. Alright. We set up one for the the department. Let's all get a drink and sometimes there are recipes. Sometimes people take out their instruments and play song scores, which we didn't know that they could do. So it's just an interesting way to see your coworkers in a different light, even though we're all kind of lockdown at this time. Actually, if I can add a point there, jumping off from what Monica said there, I come from a background of working in bigger companies. And as you start creating a smaller company, one of the things you need very often is make a decision about bringing somebody on board who doesn't necessarily come from the same background but has skills that you want to use. When a pro is unfamiliar with cloud tools and haven't engaged with them, very often. Training them over the internet has been quite a challenge, I would say. Especially when the first step is to teach the person how to use online conferencing tools. And, for instance, credit to Baphne here. We use HubSpot as our little CRM tool, and teaching somebody who's never engaged with any CRM tool, how using and how to see where the data is. It can be a bit disorientating the first time. Well, cue the cat. So I would say that was probably, a unique thing that made me start thinking up of new processes, especially when you think of how you speak to people. Like, Oh, we're going to be online at this point. Okay. What does that mean? Are you gonna Face tie me? I never realized that this was where people would intuitively go to. You know, you're going to do a WhatsApp call with me. No. No. It's online, and this is how you get on. These are the tools. I am now sharing my screen with you. These sort of basic things that we take for granted for people who haven't been, within the technology industry are certainly not as intuitive as we would take for granted. And, I would say that I've now started building processes because in the future, I expect I'm going to hire more of these people and remote work working is something that I think is a key element to be able to ensure business continuity. So I need to be able to train people and to coach them and to make them comfortable while they do it because you can also affect somebody's confidence and make them feel way more out of their depth by not doing this the right way. Yeah. That's such a valid point. In HubSpot, we transitioned all of our onboarding into a virtual setting. And it's like, you know, having to do every single thing remotely. Obviously, it's a challenge from a logistics perspective of like getting getting the laptop there, getting the the the headset, and then getting them to set up their accounts, their, you know, everything that you need to have prior to coming in on your first day, yeah, it's it's just such a it's an interesting challenge because usually everybody remote in, onboards in person, even if they're gonna work remotely. So, that that is something that we had to adapt on the fly is a process that had to change from day to night, you know, from being fully, in person to being fully remote. I think another thing that we've realized as well, as a large company, we have, all of our laptops have VPNs and you each connect with network and stuff And it was the the case of, people that are in the office all the time, they might never have done that before. So it's like setting up at the VPNs using your, like, double authentication on your phone. So that that's something that we have to train the team to do as well. Our our company has a lot of those products and we use we use our own software for our own production. And I can't even imagine. I know that we onboard, whatever they onboard, even they're gonna even if they're going to work remotely, they come into the office and they're in there for a week for initial training. And it's bring your own you bring your own hardware. So you're responsible for getting all that set up for maintaining it. You can't just take it. Go to go to IT say, hey, my VPN isn't working. That's on you. So I can't even imagine right now if it were just, alright, congratulations. You have this job. Get set up. That would be jump into the nature of it. Get you swimming. Right. I think what emerged from this first question that I ask you is that, you know, for the successful completion of a project, in this case, For example, we started talking about onboarding project. It's always a combination in my opinion between three important factors. People processes and technologies or tools. And, you know, no matter how many tools you have, if you don't have the right people, that design the processes behind it, the the the project is always, meant to be to to fail. Right? So it's always this three component of, and and Monica, maybe the importance of designing SOP standard operating position from a from a knowledge architect and technical writing point of view. That's that's, that impacts everybody else in the business. Right? It does. And there are a lot of situations where you're writing a process, okay, you know, interviewing how does this work, how is this supposed to work, and they say this is how it goes, And you get into the process and you ask, why are you doing it this way? Why aren't we doing this, this, or this? And without going through those processes and saying, why are we doing it this way. Every once in a while, sometimes you just kinda get things lost and then they just get snowballed into something that turns bigger. But, yeah, processes are critical and understanding why you're using your processes and why you're using your tools and what you're using your tools for. Knowing that going in and being able to explain that. I I really like that point knowing how to playing the tool because sometimes you're really familiar with the tool and you've been using it this whole time. But when somebody asks you, you're kind of like you, you maybe don't have it articulated in the narrowed down and objective kind of manner that helps the person comprehend. That's something that I've personally been working on. I mean, I know exactly what the CRM tool is, but when this new team member was talking to me, I was like, it's a tool that we use to manage the customers. That sounds very vague to a person that's never engaged with such a tool, you know. And then when you go further to explain, okay, so we use this tool, this is how we do online conference, is how you book a person into a calendar. You can sort of see it in their eyes. They're going, calendar invite, automatic with, you know, And why am I doing these things? Why are you telling me about this? Why am I yeah. Just I I think it's really interesting in the communication piece as well, right? Because a lot of companies will have email. They will have Slack. They will have Zoom. They will have like a project management tool. And it's like when do I communicate where? What is the right way? And and If you don't if you if you're not used to the culture of the organization and you don't know the, you know, the the the road then it's so hard. So it's the importance of documenting when to use each communication tool is also so important. Frank. Absolutely. Love it. Love it. Yeah. Go ahead, Steven. Can I ask can I ask you a a quick, a quick question? You know, because you're coming from the documentation side. That that's that's where I am. We've been working remotely as tech writers for a long time. It's been a normal part of a lot of companies. Do you find people have come to you from other parts, the company, for a bit of advice, you kind of being the leader of of how to manage this process, or maybe not a leader, but certainly a voice of a voice that people are listening to? I would love to say yes to that, but it would be disingenuous. I mean, like I my like I said earlier, my company has a lot of remote functionalities inherent already. So There's not there weren't a lot of people at ID auto that were like, oh, what do I do now? And having come from just, I mean, documentation. Usually, they're trying to get us to leave them alone anyway. So But I do feel that being able to speak to, process and how you work your process and how you're documenting your process and then how you communicate it, has really helped in previous jobs. And even in this one, just not necessarily because of this, but just as a concept, if that makes sense. Hundred percent makes makes lots of sense undrayed. Yeah. I wanted to mean in the different categories of of tools. Right? Because we have, like Daphne suggested video conferencing tool, whether it's the zoom, we're using right now or the Google and gouts or meetings or go to meetings, then we have chat tools, and I think the go to player in the base will be slack. I don't know if, every one of us is using slack. We do have cloud based drives, whether it's one drive or or Google Docs or Google Drive. There is software automation tools. Productivity tools. So there there is a lot of options right there, and and and who decides, which tool needs to be implemented, in in in the organization. And how do you make the choice of, let's go for one tool rather than another one? In a company as big as HubSpot, a lot of the the function of Wattools we use are centralized with IT So, you know, if it if it's something that's company wide, likes lack, you know, or our email servers, and that that will all be controlled, cured and and managed by IT. Now each manager within a team, each division of the organization will have specific tools that they need to complete their job, which they are much more, specialized. And maybe they are gonna be used a project or maybe they're gonna be used, by the entire team. Maybe they're only gonna be used by a couple of people. So, in in our case, the the manager would make a business case. Usually, we have a budget for department, and that budget will include, technology in it. And, we would create a business case to buying a new tool depending on what we need. I guess for a company like ours, we're noticeably smaller. So the way we choose the tools we need I mean, there's an extent in which, will pre plan certain tools that I'm trying to use for specific goals. Like, I think we, we started off straight away with Vidyard because it allowed try and engage with customers through videos straight away, which I thought was more important than or better than, emails because it's intuitive. It's easier to digest. But at the same time, we also used it within our own internal process building where instead of making the person read through all the content, having somebody explain it to you briefly is also an easier way to digest the information. But in, in a more dynamic approach, what we often do with the team is as we face certain challenges, we have to go out and look at the tools that make sense that help us. And at the same time, we work within very strict budgets, you know, we're still launching as a company. So we need to make sure that the tools we're going to use. If they must be paid, they need to bring a certain amount of value but at the same time, because the world is becoming so, cloud ready, if you like, there's such an abundance of great tools whether it's through a freemium model or even just literally free because a developer was in a good mood, some day and just made it. You know, there's a lot of tools that we can use. I can't think of an example straight out of the top of my head, but I would say that what mirror was one that we used pretty dynamically to be able to shift the conversation or my drawing of our meetings, if you like, in into, it was a problem we hadn't faced before. So that was a new tool that we brought in. But again, that's a free tool as well, actually. I know in my situation, most of the tools are chosen above my pay grade, but there are situations in which I can't think of one off the top of my head, but in which people have said, I'm trying to do this one specific thing. I think we need to bring in this. And they've talked to engineering, and they're like, okay. That doesn't look like it's gonna make any doesn't look like it's gonna cause any security issues. Go ahead. If they have to pay for it, they write the paper and, rationalize why the money needs to be spent. I do try to caution against go find a new tool for that because before you know it, you're just, like, father, you know Five hundred tool for the place. And that's one of the dangers of the cloud is like everything is there's so many options and I can use them all, but then I'm just juggling apps and I'm juggling repositories. That leads to the information is all spread in a non coherent way and you have to piece it back. Yeah. That that we did a process for that. When you run into what Daphne said, when do I communicate what where? Yeah. We we're trying to do it. We our organization recently also definitely implemented HubSpot. And, yeah, there are many, many options out there. The exercise that we're going through is to make sure that we connect all of the different pieces whether it's intercom chat and Zendesk ticket into a unique tool because it can be quite distracting, to to having to understand which tool to use according to which, use case, right? Do we use the Adzan assignable for customization or do we open a Zendesk ticket or, you know, which way? So, you know, it all ties back into the the the idea of, yeah, having the tools but also having the people behind them, the process is to document everything that it's happening within, within, within the businesses. The knee jerk reaction is always to freeze hiring, to freeze budget, to stop everything that we're doing. And, you know, I think I think it's important to to to to counter that argument because what are you gonna achieve when you freeze budget? What are you gonna achieve when you stop hiring? It's not a matter of with the impending financial crisis that we're gonna face after this, you know. It's like you wanna you wanna do the investment now, and you want to get ready and use the tools precisely that will allow you to continue to work businesses usually in the coming months as well. So I suppose, yeah, that's that's an argument that we that we find a lot, especially those of us in customer facing roles, and, you know, I think it responsibility also to to to to challenge the customer or the prospect and to say, now it's not the time to freeze the budget. You know, when the economy, you know, when there are threats from the economy, that's where you want to invest, and that's where you wanna get your technology up and running to achieve your goals in the medium to long term. Business continuity, essentially. Yeah. I would say, if COVID nineteen has taught me anything so far in twenty twenty, the wonderful year that it's been so far. It's that this is the single greatest test the cloud and the internet has gone through and after we come out on the other side of this, I don't think anyone is ever going to question the cloud or the importance of the internet in any format again. I think a really cool takeaway here is that whatever it is you're trying to do, there's a way to do it. That we currently have. It just fig it's just figuring out which setup is right for your purposes. Which puzzle pieces would you need in a sense? Exactly. Exactly. But it the it's already there. It's it's possible. If there is one message, one final message that we want to to leave the audience with, what would it be? In embracing cloud computing. Communicate more effectively, establish the routine, have a second screen. What what tips would you give to the to the community? I would say embrace the change and adopt where you come. I agree. I think it's important to be a to understand that in this chaos, there's a whole bunch of new opportunity that that arises with it and that it's sometimes difficult to be able to see it straight away. But using the example that Daphne illustrated with the coffee companies stopping making coffee and roasting their beans and giving them to you. So you can make your own coffee there's a business model adaptation that we all need to consider. What can we, automate digitize, move the service into a realm where it's not is impacted in the middle of all this chaos Netflix as more users than ever before. But if you go look at the movie theaters, there are severely sobering. You know? So it's important to understand that there's a natural transition that the world's going through, and I believe that this is going to accelerate it. And people need to start looking for opportunities that empower that. Brilliantly said, Sergio, that is excellent point. And I really don't have anything extra to add on top of what you guys have already said. I just I do agree that this is a great time to kinda sit down. Take stock, what needs to be done, how can I do it, and what do I need to make it happen? And as long as we keep that clarity of thought, with our fingers crossed, everything else should be more or less manageable. Everything will be fine. I'm sure. I think that's a wrap, guys. It's been a very fun conversation. I would like to thank you, sir, Gemini Daphne, for taking the time to share your experiences around, working remotely, collaboration. Thank you so much. Thanks for the opportunity. Pleasure to meet you guys. Pleasure. Thank you very much. Take here. Stay safe and stay sane. Yeah. Cool. Very important. Stay safe and stay sane. Bye. Bye.