Sales Intelligence Blog by Lattice Engines

Several studies aggregating information about employability, salary, and job satisfaction have ranked Software Engineer as the best job out there.  At Lattice Engines, the software team has been working on salesPRISM sales intelligence software for some time now, and we’ve certainly been making a grand old time of it.  I wanted to write a bit about what we do and what makes us so happy.

salesPRISM as a product combines a very interesting set of features:

• Sales Representatives make heavy use of salesPRISM on a daily basis, so the overall system must be robust, scalable, and perform well.
• Our customers tie salesPRISM into a variety of business processes and workflows.  Correspondingly, salesPRISM provides a very deep level of configuration, allowing us to easily meet customer needs simply by changing configuration settings rather than through custom software.
• As a SAAS application, salesPRISM is easily managed and inspected on an ongoing basis.
• We support a wide variety of integration standards and aggregate data from many different sources.
• We leverage this data for some very interesting data mining and analytic operations, which we then feed back into the running systems.

Many sales intelligence software applications support a subset of the above features, but supporting the entire collection is very challenging and lots of fun.

So how do we go about building the underlying software? Some of the most crucial decisions are simple things that apply to any software shop:

• We’ve hired a team of very smart people, and we let them do their jobs well.
• We follow solid software engineering principles, with an emphasis upon building for testability, quality coding, and automated deployment tools.
• Our overall system was designed with nice layered architecture and standard frameworks that simplify ongoing development.

This general approach has been augmented with some very specific ideas:

• In order to decrease implementation time and standardize application behavior, our software is heavily metadata driven.  We make extensive use of attributed code, and use this to integrate software components as well as to generate SQL.
• Our deployment architecture was designed so that we can scale with hardware.  Going further, at runtime we can move components around so as to best meet the specific latency targets for very different categories of operations.  For example, we can host components to support low latency end user requests on different servers than those used to service long-running data mining or CRM synchronization operations.
• We have systems in place to record performance readings across the entire operation pipeline.  In particular, we measured end user visibility, observed web service latency from the UI, server-side service latency, database latency, and Salesforce latency.
• Our database schema is also modular and allows us to separate modules based upon usage and performance constraints.
• We have some really nice data mining algorithms.

All in all, great buckets of fun for everyone.

Interested in salesPRISM sales intelligence software? Learn more.
Want to join the Lattice Engines software development team? Visit our careers page.

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Lattice Engines is a rapidly growing software company, and we are looking to add smart, analytical and creative professionals to our team. In an effort to meet new candidates, we are attending career fairs at top universities all over the country.

Last week, Lattice Engines had the pleasure of attending the Fall Career Fair at Columbia University and we were very impressed with the students we saw. The candidates who stood out all had similar characteristics:

They did their homework on Lattice Engines: Those who took the time to learn about our company and our mission in sales intelligence established an immediate connection.

They were more than a name: It’s easy to leave a resume and run, but it doesn’t leave much of an impression. The candidates who stayed to speak with our team, learn about us, and highlight their past positions brought their resumes to life and were much more memorable.

They had a great attitude: A well-dressed, professional applicant with a positive attitude and smile immediately brought energy to the conversation.  In addition, those who were polite and respectful to their peers displayed the team-player attitude that we are looking for.

They came prepared (for anything): The best candidates, however, brought more than their resume and portfolio; they were ready for any question or situation thrown at them. It was clear who practiced responses to potential questions, recognized which roles were and weren’t a good fit for them, and knew which of their specific accomplishments were relevant to each position. Some were even willing to let loose and have fun with our impromptu Rubik’s cube competition. The fastest time was 1:15 seconds.

Students compete in an impromptu Lattice Engines Rubik's cube competition

Why the Rubik’s Cube? Lattice Engines sales intelligence software applies algorithms to identify meaningful patterns in raw data. The Rubik’s cube is not only a fun bit of nostalgia, but also requires an algorithm to solve it.

Are you interested in advancing your career with Lattice Engines? Apply online at http://www.lattice-engines.com/company-careers.htm

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Aaron Levie, you are correct, it really is cool to work at an enterprise start-up.

After reading Aaron’s latest article, I was reminded of what brought me to Lattice Engines nearly one year ago to be their first Marketing Manager.

Working for an enterprise start-up is fun.

We wear jeans to the office,(occasionally) have trampoline jumping contests (no really – check out the picture), keep the fridge stocked with beer and soda – oh and we also create innovative easy-to-use software that solves really complex business problems.

Tom Kilgore - Information Engineering Manager at Lattice Engines

As Aaron so eloquently put it “emerging enterprise software companies just tend to suck much less than their predecessors.”

What we do matters.

We’re solving a growing problem facing large businesses today. Aaron describes, “With […] big data getting increasingly bigger, and a veritable data explosion, there are glaring, growing gaps in the offerings of today’s legacy vendors.”  Businesses are much more open to exploring technology that will solve these problems.  And companies like Lattice Engines, are finding their market in these data-overrun companies.

At the granular level, our software makes a sales rep’s job easier. At a much higher level, our software represents a solution to an issue almost every business faces – TMI (too much information).  Our software translates billions of data points about a company’s customers and prospects into a “how-to” approach for selling.  It tells a sales rep which prospect to contact next, which products to sell them and why the customer needs it.

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So why should you work for an enterprise start-up?  “You’ll liberate workers, save businesses money, and do your part in driving the innovation cycle further.  Consider your work philanthropic.” Wow Aaron, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

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