Alex's Blog

Just two weeks from now, August 18 to be exact, it will have been a year since I took the helm of Webtrends. I have to admit that there have been some changes in me personally over that period of time. I now have much larger bags under my eyes and I no longer giggle when my assistant answers the phone, “Alex Yoder’s office”. I ask myself, “What of substance has changed over the last year and is it all worth it?” I gotta say that the answer is unequivocally “YES”!

Think of August 2008. Webtrends just started on its fourth CEO in less than a year. In the two years prior, the company had gone through two CFO’s, three VP’s of Sales, three VP’s of Development, three CMO’s and the employee churn was almost 18% in one quarter. Ironically, burnt orange probably represented the mood of the place more than the brand. Webtrends, the onetime patriarch of the web analytics industry had been dwarfed by a blitzkrieg of colorful pie charts, marketing extravagance and empty promises.

What does one do when stepping into such auspicious and daunting circumstances? I hate to say it, but it ain’t rocket science—you go back to what got you there. For me, that’s the fundamental principles of honesty, integrity, clear and open communication and just hard work. It’s putting your customer out ahead of every other priority and making sure that the entire business is aligned behind that focus. It’s telling your customers bluntly that the software industry and web analytics itself is mature enough that they should expect more. They should expect solid, clean products. They should expect uptime, not downtime. They should expect great service and support backed by a sincere desire to help them get better.

It’s helping everyone understand that they have had a good day if they can answer yes to the question “Did I make this a better place for my peers to work and for my customers to do business?” Yes, yes, yes! It’s being willing to put yourself out there in front of and make commitments that you are going to keep.
We heard it! We hired a world-class user experience team that would fully integrate all aspects of the user experience and fundamentally change that approach. We hired experienced, trusted, diverse and talented executives and then I made a commitment to them—I will only consider myself successful in this position if we have the same people sitting at this table in two years. Suddenly, a lot of the very talented people who had left the organization started coming back—more energized than ever.

We focused on our strengths and where the industry is going, the demands that are being made on our current products and the customers that we have been the most successful retaining. We found that we have long been the most powerful solution in the space and have done nothing to help promote that notion. We felt strongly that true openness (technology, culture, values, community) is critical to the future of a successful technology company—the willingness to truly collaborate with our customers and community. We opened our doors to countless local interest groups and causes. We relaunched our brand and focused behind the pillars that we knew were important: Power, Elegance, Openness. Since we are the only truly hosted software solution in our space, we have long been known for our power. The flexibility and depth of insight that inherently comes with a hosted software solution has allowed us to attract and retain customers with the most sophisticated needs and who are typically on the higher-end of the marketing maturity lifecycle.

Our space has long been mired in the confusion of what to do with all of the data and how to leverage it to truly impact their digital businesses. While others focused on lollipop reporting, we hired experts from the agency world and volunteered their expertise to develop a vendor agnostic framework to help guide a broader understanding of what marketing maturity really looks like.

In April 2009 I stood in front of our customers, the press, analysts and our board and committed that we would deliver on our new user experience vision by the end of June 2009. At that same event, we were running paper prototyping with our customer base—none of the code had yet been written! I sat down with Jim Sterne immediately after my opening remarks and he said, “Alex, you realize that you just made a commitment that you now must deliver on? No one in technology does that”. I said, “Yep, and the entire organization is committed and standing behind that promise”.

Well, it’s been almost a year. We hired almost an entirely new executive team (all of which are still here), have the strongest sales organization in the nine years I’ve been around Webtrends, relaunched the brand, were the first to bring social measurement and web analytics together, have the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the Forrester Wave, have delivered on Openness via standards-based architecture as well as both inbound APIS and outbound API’s that are free to use, delivered the industry’s only visitor-centric data model in a hosted AND on premises solutions, were approved for the industry’s only first party cookie patent and THE patent to collect commerce data from a web page, released the new UX on time and in the process started to the whole new Webtrends revolution. Oh, I forgot, industry’s best MVT, site optimization and targeting platform to perfectly compliment our leading-edge ad director search optimization platform to the portfolio and we have nearly 7,500 customers that we’re excited to help take their web presence to the next level.

Was it worth it? ABSOLUTELY!!!!

Welcome to the new Webtrends. Welcome to the revolution.