Welcome to Behind the Flame, a series created to showcase our incidentios.
Meet Harrison Higgins , Commercial Account Executive here at incident.io.
Q: What has been your favorite incident.io memory so far?
My favorite memory was probably my first week when I was in the London office. The new experience of getting to meet the entire team, getting to learn more about the product, and making friendships and relationships that are still lasting to this day. It was a great welcome to the company.
Q: What is the value that most resonates with you?
Raise the Pace, I feel like everyone here at incident.io is moving really fast. We're working hard for our customers, trying to win new customers, releasing new features all the time. I think that that is something that I see every single day here on the job, is everyone trying to become better, building a better version of incident.io. It's been a very fast-paced culture since joining about a year ago.
Q: What is your favorite benefit?
The easy answer to this is the last Friday of the month because it's just a great time to refresh, spend time with family, or have a day off where you might not have anything planned. I also really like the health benefits we offer.
Q: What is your favorite Slack channel?
My favorite Slack channel is by far #pointless-debates-and-hot-takes. I try not to look at the social Slack channels too much to distract myself, but I typically view that a few times a week. There's always a really funny argument going on there, for example, I don't know how much milk to put in your tea. It's a funny channel, I'll always like viewing it.
Q: What advice would you give to yourself on your first day?
Don't be afraid to just go out and ask questions. We're a very Slack-heavy company and a lot of the time answers aren't in front of you, you really need to go into a public channel and ask. I think initially I was overthinking where to post it, who to ask, and how to phrase the question, but now I just have no fear and just ask whatever. You really need to be a self-advocate, go out there, and make your own path.
Q: What advice would you give to candidates interviewing?
Definitely show how self-sufficient and self-reliant you are; how you can go out and find the answers to your questions, and try something new. Don't be reliant on someone else. We have managers and a great support system, but I think what makes incident.io so special is everyone here is willing to get up and find the answers to the questions on their own.
Q: How would you describe the culture in two words?
Fast pace, and a little bit chaotic sometimes, but in a good way. Caring, everyone here really cares about each other and cares about the product. If you were to have a look at #booked-meetings, #wins and all hands, it's a culture where everyone's here to have fun and to build a very successful company but truly cares about the people that they鈥檙e working with on a day-to-day basis.
Q: Which incident.io employee would you want to be stuck in a lift with?
Jack Buckmelter, he would be able to entertain me in the lift while we wait for help or while I work out how to get us out.
Q: What does the last Friday of the month mean to you?
It means the time just to reset. It鈥檚 a day where I know I can put my phone and computer away and not have to check Slack, not have to be on call for any reason and just spend time with family, take a moment for myself, and get ready for the next month ahead.
Q: What are you most looking forward to with incident.io this year and beyond?
We've recently hired some very exciting leaders and I am very happy to see their impact throughout the company. They're on the go-to-market side, so I feel they're going to be making a great impact on our customer base and future prospective customers as well.
Q: What is something that you are excited or proud to have worked on?
I worked on running an outbound session during our Revenue Kick-off and the beginning of the year. Sharing learnings from past roles, talking about what I've seen work in the past for prospecting and trying to win new business. It was a great opportunity to do a little bit of training, as well as hold an open conversation with the team.
Q: What is it like being part of the Commercial team?
Being on the Commercial Sales Team is awesome. There are so many different types of customers and companies we get to work with. You are speaking with your really small startups that are looking to build and establish their incident management practice as they start to scale. But we're also working with really large companies that have been around for over 10 years and are looking to improve their current incident management process. On top of that, we get the opportunity to work with both new and existing customers. There are so many different types of conversations that you'll have on a given day. Definitely a lot of context switching, but it's been a great learning opportunity to pick up more skill sets than you might in another type of commercial role.
Q: How does the Sales team collaborate with other departments?
We partner incredibly closely with both Product and Customer Success. With Customer Success, it's working alongside our existing customer base, trying to share the benefits of our new products that they could adopt, and also making sure that generally, they're happy using incident.io and their adoption increases over time. From a Product perspective, we're working hands-on with them to hear from our prospective customers, what's important to them and trying to help build a path to incorporate a lot of these requests into the future of our product. Product is very hands-on with speaking with customers, I would say a few calls a week we have an engineer helping customers out, configure, set up, debug, whatever it may be.
Q: What is something that surprised you when you joined?
How heavily Slack is used. It can be a little overwhelming at first when you get on and everything is communicated over Slack. However, you get used to it really quickly and realize how awesome the level of transparency across the organization is. It's also nice because if you have a question, chances are someone's asked it in Slack before you. It's a really good database for figuring things out.
Q: If you were to join another team for the day, what team would you join and why?
I would join the Data team, understanding how customers are using our product, and learning about the markets that we're selling into, would be really interesting. They're a very well-built Data team for the size of our company and full of intelligent people. I think I could learn a lot from them and also understand how people are using our product better.
Q: Why do you think companies need a reliable incident management tool?
Things go wrong for every single company, no matter how well built out your processes are and no matter how few incidents you have, there is always a chance that something is going to go wrong. A little bit of Murphy's law, right? If something can go wrong, it will go wrong. Having the safeguards of an incident management platform that will not only guide you through the process but also help you learn over time how to improve that process is incredibly important, something that all our customers know and is the true value of incident.io.
Q: How would you describe the day-to-day as a Commercial Account Executive?
Being on the Commercial Sales team involves being ready to context switch and adapt on a given day. We're speaking from prospective customers to individual contributors all the way up to CTOs. We're also speaking with existing customers, helping them through renewals, through adoption, and helping with products. So although we're Commercial Sales reps at the same time, we're functioning as Account Managers in customer support in some instances as well.
Q: How does incident.io recognize and celebrate employee achievements and milestones?
From a sales perspective, I would say that everyone celebrates the wins, no matter how big or small they are. We have Slack channels for #booked-meetings and #wins. You'll always have comments from leadership, and from folks from throughout the business celebrating and highlighting your wins. We also highlight them on our weekly All Hands calls, so from a go-to-market perspective, it's truly a team effort and we all win as a team here.
