Vanilla News - April 2020 Edition!
Hi Vanilla!
Welcome to the fifth edition of Vanilla News. The previous post is available here.
Finance
Karine has joined the Finance team and is ramping up quickly. We've hired a new accounting firm to help us with our year end and tax returns, and we're updating our processes to allow us to close month end within 4-5 days.
This means expenses (personal and vendor invoices) will now need to be handed in on the 1st of the month.
Development
Team Chimeras (fka. Lazer Unicorns) has obviously undergone a name change. A Chimera is a mythical "hybrid" creature that is usually several animals mixed together, which reflects the 3 kinds of work the Services team performs. We logged a record number of hours in March and are working hard to stay on schedule. We are trying out a new product called Kanbanize to help us manage our Kanban workflow better as a remote team. Early signs have been very positive!
The ICB force is almost done with the webhooks user interface. Once this is done we will be ready to release webhooks as a feature which will see all of this work come to fruition.
Team Supreme has completed work on the Foundation theming system and our new theme editor. The new theme editor is being launched on public clusters presently. If you don't know about this awesome new feature, keep an eye on our blog for a longer announcement.
Success
Success has been able to handle the large number of new customers that came on in March, many of which are looking for accelerated launches to stand up a community amidst the COVID pandemic.
We have also kick started a renewed and more organized docs effort with the end goal of updating our existing documentation and being able to stay on top of new documentation needed.
Sales
We continue to monitor leading/lagging indicators in terms of lead flow and opportunity progression given the current state of the economy. In March, we had companies come to us to help them during this time, as they know that our software mitigates workforce interruption in the support organizations. Vectra AI, Xometry, Harri, TripActions and Special X hastened their buying process to help combat fallout from Covid-19. We'd like to thank all teams internally for standing up these sites in a hurry. Others, as you might expect, have gone into a spending freeze and so we wait for updates and hope that projects aren't canceled indefinitely.
Bolstered by the Oracle deal, March was a record month and Q1 a record quarter. Looking forward to trying to match those efforts in Q2.
Marketing
We had a crazy line up of in-person events (Oracle Modern CX, DevRelCon San Francisco, Gainsight and TSW San Diego) for the end of March, April and May and everything got cancelled.
This mobilized us to find new ways to get the leads we would have gotten from these events by hosting our very own virtual conference. We have a CRAZY speaker line up thanks to Adrian's networking. We are hosting another edition of Vanilla Conversations in May, 3 days, 15 sessions online featuring experts from Oracle, Twitter, Domo, Qualtrics, MoneySavingExperts, Outsystems, TripActions, OpenSource.com and many more.
Mike has created for us new marketing personas to help us focus our efforts, along with nurturing campaigns that are yielding better results than we've ever had before. Haya has been knocking it out of the park with our social media campaigns and drove 100 MQLs out of our social channels in March. Irina shipped our gorgeous new Enterprise, Case Study and Newsroom sections and Sarah's been writing up a storm with several new ebooks and blog articles.
I really couldn't be more proud of this team! GO MARKETING! ?
Support
Support is preparing for a potential increase in tickets as we encourage clients to update jsconnect following our most recent release. We have also been cleaning up our ticket backlog in preparation for a move to Freshdesk. That’s right, Freshdesk is happening! So long, Happyfox.
It’s very exciting to move platforms, but it’s also a cross department endeavour to get everything set up. There may be hiccups as the agents, CSMs, and billing get moved over in the coming weeks, but we’ll keep everyone aware of any process changes that come about because of the move.
Operations
The Operations team continues to push toward its 3 ongoing projects, hoping to wrap them quickly before getting started with Oracle work.
Kill Papertrail is ready for use but requires a little time to collect data before it will be useful. We're also working on figuring out the best way to let people log into it.
Kill The Worker is in the testing phase. We uncovered some additional requirements late in the project and had to extend the timeline slightly.
Advanced Monitoring is still under development, it's a large project that affects all our servers.
Thanks for reading :)
