Tony Alika Owens on the Urgency of Empowering Your Teams with Performance Intelligence

Tony has more than 20 years of experience building and managing large, high-growth technology sales organizations at world-renowned tech companies, including LivePerson, Salesforce, and Oracle. 

Let’s see what he said.
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Why Performance Intelligence?

The best ideas that businesses get is by folks that are on the front lines because they're the ones who are engaging with the customers. And so by the time you're getting the feedback from all of your customers, and your partners and employees, and you put that with alignment that goes with what your business objectives are, when you can bring those two things together, it's extremely powerful.

The information that you're getting is perishable, contextual, and actionable. So, if you're giving a broad set of information and asking somebody to decipher, it's not contextual for them. And if you're giving it to them a week late, or a month late, or quarter late, it's perishable. And so by those two virtues, it's no longer actionable, and there's nothing people love more than getting feedback where they can improve. Everybody wants to do better.

One of the common things that the most successful teams have is this idea of a stakeholder mentality. And when I talk about stakeholders, I'm talking about customers, partners, employees, and communities. And when these teams work together, and they keep all of the stakeholders in mind, they magically are more successful over an extended period of time.

Why Pathlight?

Productivity for employees, it's an age-old problem and so what folks really need right now is information that allows them to be successful and allows them to be coached. Pathlight is solving a really big problem in a different way. Most reporting is done in the rearview mirror, and that's how most people are trying to solve the problem. Pathlight solves problems that are in the car. What are we experiencing right now? And because they're getting that information and they can aggregate it across their entire business, they can also look out the front windshield and anticipate what's coming in the future.

Pathlight brings a combination of the right information at the right time, plus a system of engagement that allows you to work directly with your team members, to be more successful.

The culture here is amazing. We're actually helping people become better leaders. We're helping people be more productive, and we're helping people get transparency into the goals of the company, their customers, their partners.

Why now? 

Employee attrition and this fight for talent has always been there, but it's dramatically spiked over the last few years, and I don't necessarily know that's going away because the war for talent has only gotten more fierce. And so we have to spend a lot more time with employees coaching so that we can dial down attrition.

A common trait between the most successful teams is actually the culture that they build. And the top-performing teams are never satisfied. They want to continue to solve problems and what they're looking for is transparency in the communication and transparency in the action, and be able to have alignment with all the different stakeholders.

The speed of business is really determined by your internal requirements as a business and external forces that are put on that business and Pathlight nails that. It addresses it head-on. And not only is it gathering information from your frontline employees, it's also empowering those frontline employees to be able to make decisions, in the moment, because these interactions with customers, they need to be contextual, and they are perishable. You have to be able to have the answers right now.

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