Welcome to March! It’s the magical month where the sun starts to show itself again, clocks skip forward, and college basketball reminds us that anything is possible through hard work, determination, and a competitive spirit. At Velsera, our Customer Success team recently decided to lean into our own competitive spirit and had a team-building event where we talked about our passion and enthusiasm for all things competition. Learning about how our team competes also allowed us to reflect on how we show up each day with that same energy and drive for our customers. For those of us who presented, there were common themes in how we approach competition: always adapt, acknowledge that strong competitors help you grow, and most importantly, there is always room for improvement. Let’s walk through how we apply these core tenets in our approach with our customers.
Adapt and respond quickly to market and customer feedback
In preparation for game day, coaches and teams spend an enormous amount of time watching films and preparing for their opponents, but Cinderella stories do not exist just because of this alone. They exist because in certain games, one team is better at adapting to a different game script than what they prepared for and can change their style of play to compensate. Much like sports, our team takes a lot of pride in being the experts they are in their field. They author papers, present them at conferences, participate in consortiums establishing new standards, and review new regulatory guidelines to ensure that they stay up to date to deliver the best customer experience possible. However, the speed at which our field can change also requires our team to quickly pivot to ensure that what we are delivering meets our customers’ evolving needs. When the FDA ruling on laboratory-developed tests started shifting the market, our customers started indicating they were interested in bringing onboard FDA-approved in vitro diagnostic (IVD) tests with expanded reporting but would need our help. Our clinical services team quickly met and designed our new IVD and Clinical Decision Support Assessment service offerings, while our product and engineering teams worked vigorously to ensure our product could support these new-to-market assays. Together we ensured that we could meet the new needs of a growing market and our customers’ success. Similarly, when we received client feedback that our bioinformatics offerings should be easier to understand in the sales cycle, we responded by using the data we had on completed projects to introduce size-based service offerings that allow us to more quickly assess customer requests and provide solutions.
On any given day, our team can switch from man-to-zone defense for our clients depending on their needs.
Observe, learn and grow from one another
The columnist, George Matthew Adams, said about competitors that you shouldn’t belittle them but rather, “Praise them. Learn from them. There are times when you can cooperate with them to their advantage and to yours! Speak well of them and they will speak well of you. You can’t destroy good ideas. Take advantage of them.” At Velsera, where our mission is based on driving science forward to advance precision medicine, this could not be truer. We recognize that having strong competitors elevates your own game, and helps you learn and grow. Our clients’ successes, and their ability to fuel one another’s daily research, bring us all closer to our mutual goal. This is why community is such a major focus for us. We invest in our community in various ways, to ensure that we are engaging, learning, and collaborating with one another to help advance research. Our Community Engagement Services team onboards and trains users in our systems, holds office hours, teaches workshops, and ensures they are constantly reaching out to our user base to understand pain points, provide solutions, and connect users with colleagues in our company or our user ecosystem with whom they would benefit from speaking. To push these types of engagements to an even wider audience, we recently launched our online Community, which allows our users to engage directly with one another, as well as our team, on current topics, as well as provide advice, share expertise, and better themselves through mutual collaboration. To be the best, you must learn from the best, and our community is the best, which is why we work so hard to foster it.
While the end score determines who wins the game, our team realizes that rebounds and assists are critical, and we aim for a triple-double every day.
Always reflect on experiences and use them to continuously improve
Athletes and competitors know that to compete is to constantly push yourself harder. One more shot, one more lap, one more lift, everyday people push themselves beyond the limits of yesterday to improve. When things go well, it is easy to become complacent and accept that that is “good enough”. Not for our team. Our team thinks that each win is just as critical to assess as the losses to understand where opportunities for improvement lie. A great example of this is our revenue cycle management services. Our team has successfully achieved reimbursement approval for clients in less than a week, but instead of celebrating, we assessed and cataloged what contributed to that approval and added it to our list of “must include.” Collectively, we use our lessons learned to ensure that we provide the best guidance to our clients from every experience, positive or negative. Our company culture encourages our team to constantly improve but also to celebrate innovation and take risks. To emphasize this, we recently announced the “Velsera Fast and the Curious Awards,” which celebrates our employees’ acts of sparking innovation, showing natural curiosity for learning, and driving improvements for our company, customers, and end patients. We realize that not every idea will come to fruition, but we want our employees to feel the freedom to take a risk. If it works, that is great, but equally as important, if it fails, let it fail fast, and then learn and grow from that experience.
Like the great Michael Jordan, we work hard to ensure we win but understand that failure is part of trying, and so we encourage one another to embrace the losses just as much as the wins and use that to learn, grow, and always keep up the attempts.
Competition is a core part of the human experience, and at Velsera we have learned to embrace it to provide the best responses to our customers, encourage a community mindset to take risks, and learn from the experience. We do this with a single goal: to advance precision medicine and get the ultimate win for the end patients. Our team of smart, determined, passionate individuals show up every day, warmed up and ready to improve our products, services, and support for our customers. With this past Sunday being that of selection Sunday, we are also busy embracing March and channeling our competitive spirit into our 4th Annual Velsera Charity NCAA Basketball Bracket tournament benefiting pediatric cancer research. For those of you who also filled out brackets, best of luck! May the Cinderella stories this year be the ones you predicted in your picks. If you want a champion in your corner, feel free to reach out to see how we can help you win.