Communication - Be the Bull!

Email became my vehicle of choice to try and rally the troops.  Email was like handing me a megaphone in the middle of a Sunday morning church service – If there was a volume level to email it was a 12 on a scale of 1-10.   


Win alerts came out frequently – called Tornado Alerts – imagine the force of wind strong enough to level a town – that was what we were doing to the competition.   These emails shared key elements of why we won, who we beat, deal size and the names of the salesperson, SE (don't forget the SE) and inside rep.  Every employee within the company was copied on the win notes -- As a culture - we won together - we lost together (if we lost we wanted to know why so we could try and do something about it).  

Sometimes you do something while communicating that takes on a viral nature....within the Data Domain sales culture it became the "Bull email" -- "Be the Bull was born". 

Ok – the Bull emails started off innocently enough.  I was in Europe at a partner conference in Spain and the running of the Bulls was going on and their was a picture of a group of Bulls stomping on some stupid humans who decided it was a good idea to run in front of them.  So my analogy…Go be a Bull and run over your competition.  I sent a note and copied the picture into an email – what happened was amazing.  My team started to customize the picture…they put names on the stupid human’s that were our competitor’s names – IBM, EMC, Netapp, HDS, etc…

More colorful pictures began to circulate - Pictures of skewered matador's  -- the image - reflected the culture - we (Data Domain) were the Bull.  New phrases like “Be the Bull”, Watch out for the Horns and others were launched.  

If you were the subject of a Bull email you just received the ultimate praise. 

Remember -- Be the Bull!!!