SuccessFactors provides numerous opportunities for you to learn more about our products–and one particular team member is the powerhouse behind the events that happen all across North America. Planning to attend a local SuccessFactors event? Learn a bit about our Marketing Manager and these unique events.

Name: JD Davis

Title: Senior Marketing Manager

What do I do for SuccessFactors?
I am responsible for the SuccessFactorsLive events in North America. These events are for our current customers and potential customers to come network with other HR professionals, and focus on highlighting our customer’s successes and provide an opportunity for everyone to learn from industry experts and meet your local HR peers. You can check out our PerformanceConnect, PeopleConnect, IndustryConnect and RegionConnect events on the Events Calendar. I’ll be coming soon to a city near you!

How can I help you?
My goal is to bring you a variety of regional events to give you the opportunity to meet and network with other customers. I want you to walk away from our SuccessFactorsLive events with interesting, useful content that will help you learn more about our product, key players in your HR community, and the HR industry as a whole. We currently have breakfast seminars (PerformanceConnect), networking dinner events (PeopleConnect), Special Interest Groups/SIGS (IndustryConnect) and regional user groups (RegionConnect)….what else would you like to see? Are there people from SuccessFactors that you can benefit from spending some “live” time with at these events? Who are some of the industry leaders you would like to hear from? What topics are important to you? Let me know! I want to help make you and your organization more successful!

Upcoming Events
Thursday, May 1, 2008
PerformanceConnect Breakfast Seminar
New York, New York

Thursday, May 22, 2008
PeopleConnect Networking Dinner
Philadelphia, PA

June 2-5, 2008
SuccessConnect 2008
This event is ramping up to be SuccessFactors’ best event yet! With more customer speakers, more product tracks, more tracks for Professional Edition customers, more innovation, more networking and more partners, we’re gearing up for an event you won’t want to miss. More information about the agenda and registration will be coming in the New Year.

By Brendan Delumpa, Senior UI Developer

Before coming to SuccessFactors, I had worked in a variety of environments, ranging from small start-ups with less than ten people, to large, established companies composed of thousands of people. While many of those places claimed to have “open door” policies and said they embraced collaboration, innovation, and creativity, in reality, most engaged in various forms of knowledge hoarding and turf protection, and had cultures that were happy maintaining the status quo, wary of new or groundbreaking approaches to solving problems. So it was a bit unsettling for me to come to SuccessFactors where everyone collaborates, communication is generally direct and always honest, and where creativity and innovation are the norm rather than the exception.

There are many things we do here on a daily basis that support what I’ve mentioned above. For instance, in the engineering department, before we can check in any files we’ve worked on, we have to get another person to review our changes and demonstrate what effect they have on the application. While this is to ensure quality, it is also an opportunity to collaborate and share knowledge, as the reviewer may know of a more efficient method to accomplish some operation, or may provide insight into a possible enhancement in addition to your change. To me, this is phenomenal! I’ve never been in an organization that turns what is normally a very tedious task into an opportunity to be better – and it happens all the time!

I honestly spent the first few weeks of my employment saying to myself that this work environment was too good to be true. But over time, as I settled into my new role, I realized that it is good, and it is true. I work in a truly awesome culture! Now, I just couldn’t work in any organization that doesn’t operate this way! SuccessFactors has set a new standard for me.

By Gunn-Siri Stromme, Lead Generation Representative

It’s a given that SuccessFactors promotes the heck out of our own products—but to have our customers and prospects do it as well? Now that’s rewarding. The following story is no exaggeration.

I recently participated in an HR fair in Stockholm. During a lunch meeting, I sat beside someone from a potential client I had worked with and her VP of HR, plus several other participants. We had never met in person, so I introduced myself. They immediately replied, “Oh, it’s so nice to meet you, yes we have spoken a lot on the telephone, it’s nice to have a face behind the voice. We really liked SuccessFactors!”

SuccessFactors had lost the deal in question, because we had entered the running too late into the project and their IT department was not interested in a hosted solution. They ended up choosing another vendor, who they already had chosen when SuccessFactors entered the picture.

We then started to talk about tools to support Human Capital Management, and one of the other VPs of HR at the table said that they would soon be buying an HCM product from another large company this year. I was just about to jump in and sing the praises of SuccessFactors, but before I got a sound out my old prospects were saying to her, “No! You’ll have to look at SuccessFactors, they are the best, [that other company] is nothing, you can’t POSSIBLY choose them over SuccessFactors!” I did not need to even open my mouth during the discussion—and it ended with the new prospect enthusiastically asking for my business card!

How wonderful to be a part of company that has such a good product that even customers that did not choose you, sell you!

Let’s begin at the beginning. What’s a HappyFactor? Well, at SuccessFactors we struggle with helping people understand what a truly unique culture we have. Sure, every company thinks that – and you don’t have any reason to believe it from us either – unless we prove it, right? Well, that’s a HappyFactor. Something great about SuccesFactors that makes us unique. Special. Worth getting to know. A factor in our happiness and yours, too, if you join us as a customer, partner, or employee.

This blog is about sharing our happyfactors with you from the inside. Stay tuned for unique posts from fellow employees that, ideally, will help to give you a better idea of what goes on behind-the-scenes at SuccessFactors. Why should you care? SuccessFactors is a company that’s about more than software, it’s about success. We’ve got all the stuff you’re used to – datasheets, whitepapers, and the data that proves we’ve got the best Performance & Talent Management products on the market (and we do). But we’ve also got the company best prepared to help you achieve success. Real, measurable, meaningful success. This blog will give you insight into the art, science and magic of SuccessFactors and our people, and give you a chance to understand why success, not software, is our true passion.

Read on for the first of many HappyFactors!

By Mary Poppen
Professional Services Practice Manager

My path to SuccessFactors has been a unique one–I have had the distinct pleasure of being both a customer and an employee of SuccessFactors. I believe this dual perspective provides me with a very special view of the SuccessFactors culture and mission, which I wanted to share with all of you.

As one of SuccessFactors’ first 25 customers (we now have 1750+!), I had no idea how lean the organization was until about two years into our contract. When I learned that they had just 12 employees upon our implementation, I was amazed. How could 12 people provide the kind of service and product that we were being provided? SuccessFactors was like no other vendor I had ever worked with. The implementation was extremely smooth and fast, the support team was extremely responsive and ready to jump on any issue that arose, and engineering was releasing enhancements every month that continued to make the product more incredible and applicable to our business processes. Being a customer of SuccessFactors was definitely more of a strategic partnership than the traditional vendor-customer relationship.

After four years as a customer, I decided that the people and products at SuccessFactors were really the place for me. I joined the SuccessFactors team in October of 2005 as a Professional Services Consultant, implementing the software for organizations of all sizes and industries. It didn’t take long for me to realize I had made the best career move of my life. The people, the customers, the leadership, the product…a culture like no other I have ever experienced! What makes it so incredible? Here are just a few reasons:

• Sincere, genuine, daily emails from a CEO who is extremely proud of the team and the product—whether it’s a spontaneous email celebrating customer go-lives; congratulating product managers and engineers on a challenging issue that was resolved; or following a customer experience and educating the company so others can learn and grow;
• Colleagues who will drop everything to assist with an issue because a customer is planning to go-live with our product the next day;
• Colleagues from all areas of the organization who will respond to a plea for help or a question day or night;
• Collaboration across sales, services, product management, engineering and marketing to ensure alignment on new and existing offerings;
• Innovations to remain an exciting, cutting-edge software company that recognizes that the software must change and transform with business needs to be truly valuable;
• The opportunity to learn something new every day (literally) and the chance to apply it as quickly as it is learned;

These are just a few of the things that make SuccessFactors a truly unique company, and just a few of the reasons why I feel so lucky to be here! And what’s more, all of these things don’t just provide value to the employees here; what goes on behind the scenes makes us all the more effective for our customers as well.

At our Q1 2008 Employee All Hands meeting in San Mateo, California, SuccessFactors held our first ever video contest. As we’ve conveyed in other posts, our corporate culture is a unique one and can be difficult to convey in so many words. But a video? That could do the trick. SuccessFactors employees all had the opportunity to submit a 2 minute video for the contest, exemplifying how we LIVE our values every day with our unique, collaborative, performance-driven culture, and provide a personal spin on just what our products can do. The winners this year were from our Paris office–congratulations team! They did a fantastic job of truly exhibiting what it is that SuccessFactors does, and the incredible, imaginative people who are behind it. Take a look!