BigPanda stories

Syed Rahman, Revenue Analytics – Illinois

Syed RahmanAnalytical. Patient. Basketball fan.

What did you do before BigPanda?

I was at Granger, which is a huge $12B company and market leader in the B2B industrial supply space. They had a great culture. Before that, I started off my career at Sears Holdings, which was another company with a great amount of history. Unfortunately for the company, while I was there, things were tracking regression. I decided to switch gears and went to Granger. At Granger, I was mostly in finance, supporting the analytics space. I reported to a couple different business units. One of them was our North American Sales and Service team. I spent a couple years supporting that team. The second team was kind of similar to BigPanda in their space, and they supported our IT team.

What was your favorite role?

When I was at Granger, the role was actually pretty similar to what I do today at BigPanda. At BigPanda, I’m more focused on data analytics and data strategy. But overall it had a similar theme of working and manipulating data and analytics to leverage insights as well as thinking of better ways to align our go-to-market strategy. Granger is definitely a different kind of sales cycle: you’re selling products to customers and products to business. They had much shorter sales cycles but similar thought processes—what are the best ways to segment customers, what are the metrics we need to look at to improve our sales process, etc. I found it was something I really enjoyed, and it is what made me think I would be a good fit at BigPanda.

What led you to be interested in BigPanda?

So I’m working, supporting the IT team at Granger. It’s a large enterprise, right? They have a huge budget and copious amounts of resources. Supporting that team was challenging because you always had to think about how to best drive efficiency within the organization. We had a ton of tools, a ton of resources, and it was a lot of work to figure out just how to manage those tools. Managing and tackling those alerts was a lot. I figured if this issue existed at Granger, other large enterprise companies would be experiencing the same issues. Organizations all around the country, and all around the world, are running into the exact same problem. I had heard of BigPanda and how they solved exactly that issue—I was intrigued.

What’s your favorite part of the work you’re doing now?

I really enjoy the differentiation of experiences. Throughout my career, I was really focused on looking at large, established companies with a ton of history. Switching gears and joining the startup space was really exciting and refreshing. It’s very fast paced and keeps you on your toes. We’re a small but mighty team. I really enjoy the people I work with, and we have a great leader. I’m excited to see where our team is headed in the next 12 to 24 months. We have a great amount of opportunity to leverage data and use that to reach customers across several different demographic profiles, whether it’s account size or region or type of organization. BigPanda brings a huge value proposition for all of them.

How do you find balance between work, your home and your personal life?

I don’t think there’s a magic formula—or if there is, I haven’t cracked it yet. It’s hard to tell your toddler no. They demand a lot of time, and I’ve found they don’t really care for my work schedule or deadlines! Or whether or not I want to watch the game on TV.

Finding time requires finding a balance. Life is tough. One of the keys I find promotes success is keeping yourself flexible and having people around you who are flexible. Whether that’s my wife and how we can be flexible for each other, or my coworkers or leader. Having open communication and trying to be flexible has been key for me.

What is one of your superpowers?

I always find these questions tough because I hate talking about myself. Going on the theme of having two toddlers, functioning off no sleep is something that I’ve grown accustomed to—which has come in pretty handy.