With 14 years of start-up experience, Alex Siegler’s passion is in helping businesses, people, and communities grow. Growing up in a family of entrepreneurs and innovators, he has always been drawn to the idea and practice of constant learning and improvement.
More about Place Technology and Alex’s experience can be found below:
Tell us more about your role in Place Technology?
At Place Technology my formal title is Manager, Strategic Alliances, but like with lots of startups, I wear a few different hats. My main role is to manage our existing strategic partners, like Salesforce, and to recruit and manage additional partners who will support our customers with services or refer new business to us. So I’m responsible for generating new revenue via those partners, and ensuring our customers have access to a network of solutions that are complementary to the software that we offer. In addition to that, I help guide our sales and marketing strategy and enable our sales team and partner sales teams to better position our software to potential customers.
What is the most difficult part of your job? But the most rewarding one?
The most difficult part of my job is that we’re essentially creating a new category of software for the segment of the market we target. That means that we have to think hard about how we educate prospective customers about the unique ways they can use our software to solve problems they know they have now, and may not have known they have.
The most rewarding part of my job is seeing the hard work we’ve put into training our sales team pay off when the team hits a new achievement, like hitting a sales pipeline target or winning a new customer they worked hard on supporting.
Is there anything that you would change about your professional path?
People tell me they can’t stand debating me, so I get the feeling I should have been a lawyer. Though I have a hard time imagining loving the legal profession as much as I love generating revenue for startup!
What’s your key strategy for the development of your company?
At Place Technology, we’re so early in the evolution of our company that strategies and activities can change like the wind. With that said, a key to our growth recently has been sticking to the strategy of a narrow target market. The customers our software supports most effectively are usually software or professional services companies, so knowing that, we’ve made it a priority to attract more customers in those industries. The buyers of our software find it comforting to know that our software is purpose-built for not only their role, but their role within their specific type of company. That really seems to resonate with our new prospects and customers.
What do you think about the next period of time, keeping in mind the pandemic and the new business climate?
How will your industry be affected?The SaaS software industry and the professional services firms that support the industry are generally booming during the pandemic. I think the pandemic actually catalyzed those industries to perform exceedingly well because they are so crucial to completing digital transformations, which nearly every company has been forced to undergo. Since that digital transformation trend has been accelerated, I think post-COVID-19, it will continue to accelerate and our business and industry will continue their wild growth.
What books do you have on your nightstand?
I have both the curse and the blessing of being a non-linear thinker and doer, so I always seem to be reading multiple books at a time. I recently finished a few Kurt Vonnegut books, which have been a rare fictional escape for me. Vonnegut was such a creative thinker with a background of having fought in WWII and then becoming a German POW in Dresden, and then becoming a world-renowned author. He had such a unique perspective and so much to say about the world, expressed so creatively.
And now I’m reading two non-fiction books. The first is called Sell the Way You Buy, by David Priemer. David was a top sales leader at Salesforce in its early days, now a top sales coach, and his perspective on modern sales is so refreshing and valuable. I’ve already taken action on lots of his advice, and have seen the advice paying off for our sales team as well. The other book I’m reading is called 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. It’s an intense book, written mainly for a different audience, but I find it valuable nonetheless. Peterson is a polarizing figure these days for many people, but for anyone who decides to truly hear his background, his educational and medical pedigree, and his perspectives, I think they will find value in his words.
Because of the current economic climate our publication has started a series of discussions with professional individuals meant to engage our readers with relevant companies and their representatives in order to discuss their involvement, what challenges they have had in the past and what they are looking forward to in the future. This sequence aims to present a series of experiences, recent developments, changes and downsides in terms of their business areas, as well as their goals, values, career history, the high-impact success outcomes and achievements.
