Who is Georg?
I am Georg – Vice President Revenue of paretos GmbH, a leading software company and one of Germany’s fastest growing tech start-ups.
I love to continuously drive optimization for customers, seeking to understand business challenges and growth strategies. As a certified business coach and facilitator, building high-performance teams to accomplish this mission is my ultimate passion. With more than 25 years in Enterprise Sales & Revenue Management, I accelerated hyper-growth companies like Demandware (acquired by Salesforce), Celonis (Decacorn) and quantilope. And I am still enjoying this kind of job more and more every day.
Outside of work I love all kinds of sports and physical activities, I love spending time outdoors with my family and friends, climbing mountains, going camping (even more exciting in winter) or ski mountaineering. A couple of years ago I discovered that playing the guitar offers me a healthy balance in my fast-paced life.
Tell us more about your role in paretos.
Together, my team and I help companies to rethink & optimize their decision-making. In recent years our interconnected world has become increasingly complex, and therefore existing decision-making processes in companies are no longer sufficient. Our Decision Intelligence platform enables companies to make better, more informed decisions by, for example, matching vague sentiments with validated data.
I am building a team of subject experts to inform the market and help companies validate and implement this new, groundbreaking solution and optimize their operations.
We are still a young company and there are many exciting facets to my daily work at paretos, such as building a scalable organizational structure to drive growth or validating and implementing a software tool stack to automate our demand generation. A key focus also lies on clearly communicating values to the market as well as training and coaching the team.
What is the most difficult part of your job? But the most rewarding one?
Finding the right talent for this complex task is a particular challenge, as we are building a new category on the market with great speed. Many talented people are excited about working in a start-up. Having worked for high-growth companies for the past 10 years, I have learned that not everyone is made for or feels comfortable in this challenging environment.
Constant change, rapid failure and continuous learning should be in your DNA. To have an ultimate growth mindset as well as a strong cultural fit are crucial hiring criteria too.
Is there anything that you would change about your professional path?
My professional career has developed in three waves.
In early years, I was taught the complex craft of selling by the most professional sales organizations of the time. After 50 challenging and rewarding quarters, I could not imagine doing the same for the next 100 quarters.
So I started my own business and focused on advising young companies on building and training high-performing sales teams, coaching the founders and the management team. I had the opportunity to further professionalize my skills in all areas. And I realized that I accomplish the most and enjoy each day when I am part of ONE team. That’s why I decided to give up my own company and joined Demandware.
I am now in my third wave, and specialized on supporting young, high-growth companies. And I’m enjoying that more than ever. Naturally, there have been successful and challenging times along the way, and, looking back, each step has really helped me to learn and grow. That’s why I wouldn’t change a thing.
What’s your key strategy for the development of your company?
Perfect timing and perfectly talented people are the key to success.
Our economy is facing one of the most difficult environments in decades.
Every business is searching for the best way to manage these new challenges. Our solution provides a valuable solution for all relevant industries and all departments. This is what I would call perfect timing.
This is a great opportunity and at the same time a real challenge, as it is easy to lose focus. Ensuring to follow a clear business course and developing one use case at a time with proven impact becomes even more important. Carefully listening to customers and prospects to understand their complex and challenging environment is a critical part of developing a solution that helps these companies to both optimize and grow.
This task clearly requires people who are willing and skilled to take on this difficult and demanding job. Bringing “the most talented and motivated people” and no passengers on board of the rocket ship is crucial!
What do you think about the next period of time, keeping in mind the pandemic and the new business climate? How will your industry be affected?
The last two years have been exceptionally challenging for all of us. We have had to deal with completely new circumstances practically overnight. Companies had to find new ways to operate effectively or completely rethink their business. This was especially tough because no one had the ability to go back to previous experiences. Although it was a challenging time, there were also some positives. We had to quickly learn the impact of disrupted supply chains and identify new ways to fix the problems in our operation. There was no other option but to do our best every day, leveraging our experience and to learn quickly. We also learned that AI technology is a great supporter. Humans are great at finding the right strategy and providing context. Machines are phenomenal at leveraging big data, analyzing tera-bites of insights, and finding patterns. I am confident that we all grew in the last two years. We are in the driver seat to shape the future by leveraging AI technology.
Please name a few technologies which have the greatest impact on your business.
We use Miro, Around and Notion for internal collaboration. And we also use our own technology to always make the best decisions. At any time 🙂
What books do you have on your nightstand?
I would love to have more time reading inspiring books. Currently I am reading a couple in parallel: “Gung Ho!” (Ken Blenchard, Sheldon Bowles) paretos defined the insights of the book to our core values. Next is “2030.
Wieviel Mensch verträgt die Zukunft?” (Gábor Jánszky, Lothar Abicht). The third book I just started is from Alexander Gedat, a friend of mine and a very inspiring personality: “Mutig sein. Glücklich werden”.
