#163 - Mike Seidle, CTO at PivotCX - On creating solutions customers value, not just like

Mike Seidle is an technology entrepreneur based in Indianapolis, Indiana. He is a man of many talents with an entrepreneurial mindset. In his past, he founded White River Technology Group, Indy Associates, Professional Blog Services, and Virtual Payment Systems.

Today, he’s the CTO at PivotCX – a company that’s on a mission to help companies respond to every job candidate in seconds. The result: Recruitment teams will be able to handle 4-6x current candidate volume, improve hire quality, and most importantly, deliver an award-winning candidate experience

This inspired me, and hence I invited Mike to my podcast. We explore the journey they’ve been through and how COVID became their wake-up moment. We discuss the big lessons learned in bringing their solution to market and what it means and requires creating solutions that customers not only need – but also want – a solution that grows in value as things get tough.

Here are some of his quotes:

The hardest thing in all of this was that we held on to what we were doing originally for too long. We did our first little foray into doing chat, in 2018. And had we been paying attention to that, we could have made the pivot that we ended up making because we got an extreme slap in the face from the market with COVID.

If we had been listening, I almost hate to say this, and I hope none of my investors are listening. But if we had heard that from the market two, three years ago, it's almost frightening to think about how successful this would already be.

What I did learn from all this is that probably the best way to be prepared is to really focus on making sure what you're doing is business critical.

If you're doing something that's valuable, it will become more valuable. If you're doing something that's extra, it will be extra when things are lean and probably get cut.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. The importance to start paying attention to the early signals from customers that you are on the wrong track instead of listening to your own stories
2. How shifting focus from selling “cost savings” to “giving your customers a position of advantage in the eyes of their customers” can be the difference between having no traction to winning 8 out of 10 deals
3. Why we often think we are smarter than everybody else – and why that doesn’t help at all
4. How small ideas can mean the difference between having 10 users and 10000 – and how to find them.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Mike Seidle
• Website PivotCX