Team Building - The Inflectra Way

November 28th, 2022 by inflectra

Two of Inflectra's Core Values are Great Team and Great Workplace. As part of making these values a reality, we recently had our U.S. business development (sales, marketing, customer success, and partnerships) team come together for a two-day offsite in our headquarters. The purpose of the offsite was to make sure that our newest team members felt connected to the company, and also to discuss ways we can improve the customer experience in 2023.

Bringing The Team Together

Since we had some members of the team traveling to Europe for the upcoming Agile Testing Days event in Potsdam, Germany, we decided it was a good opportunity to bring the members of our US business development team together for the offsite before the conference travels.

Here you can see Sriram, Audrey and Rick arriving in Silver Spring, MD the night before. The McGinty's pub in Downtown Silver Spring is popular favorite with our team. Sadly the darts board was fully occupied this time around.

The Serious Stuff - Retrospectives and Planning

The offsite was great opportunity for our team to do an agile retrospective on our SalesOps process, understand where we had successes and where we could improve our process:

Brainstorm of SalesOps process

The SalesOps process is the brainchild of our Head of Marketing, Thea Maisuradze, and applies the concepts of DevOps to business development.

With our new account manager structure, SalesOps allows us to deliver a consistent and amazing customer experience from the first contact, through pre-sales to customer success and long-term partnerships.

Team Building - Making T-Shirts

In addition to the serious work, having time for team building is critically important. We had several people join the team in Q3/Q4 and it was a good opportunity for them to get to know the members of the team who aren't based in the Washington, DC area. One crazy activity pioneered by Jessica and Andrea was a T-Shirt making contest. Using our fabulous stickers, the team constructed their own personalized Inflectra T-Shirts.

The plan is to then use some of the designs for next year's company T-Shirts for conferences and other events.

The Paper Plate Awards

For anyone who had children on swim-teams in America, this should be familiar. At the event of the swimming season, the team gives out 'paper plate' awards to everyone on the team, with personalized slogan / nickname for the person based on how they had helped the team. We present here, some of the awards!

Thea got the master juggler award for juggling all of the myriad sales and marketing activities!

Adam got the Super CEO award for being I guess... a Super CEO!

Teresa got the Demo Diva award for all her amazing demos and video recordings. You will have heard her on the Inflectra YouTube channel quite a lot!

Francois got the Sea of Patience Award for dealing with renewals, invoices, payments, non-payments and every other scenario you can imagine!

Kendra got the Quick Study award for her rapid on boarding and taking on the management of our marketing channels (social, meetups, webinars, etc.)

The amazing Audrey got the Partner Princess award for her complete revamping of the Inflectra partner program, including the handling of partner on-boarding and training as well as working with our techno partners and US solution partners.

Rick of course won the Rick of all Trades award for his major multi-tasking of sales, marketing, conferences, video editing, bourbon and so much more!

Andrea who only recently joined the team got the Organize Everything award for her help in organizing the chaos that was company operations.

Team Happy Hour

After the awards were done, we had an office-wide (for those who could make it) catered lunch and evening happy hour.

As the sign suggests, Harmony is important to Inflectra and we all felt excited to plan out 2023 with our amazing team and of course you, our amazing customers.