By Michael Tessler, Managing Partner

Continuing on the BroadSoft Secrets series, I want to shift gears and share some funny (and odd) moments. Beware! You might never know when I may feature you in a story. Kidding - but thanks to all the folks I’ve met along the way that has provided some interesting experiences. 

At BroadSoft, I must have had hundreds (maybe even thousands) of customer meetings over the years. I spent a lot of time traveling to customers all over the world from North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. My passport was covered with the security stickers. Not only did I meet with them in their local offices, but at international events like Mobile World Congress (Barcelona stories to come) and, of course, at Connections. 

I took some time reflecting on some of those customer meetings and I remembered a particular meeting I had with AT&T. Many of you know that AT&T became a strategic BroadSoft customer. In order to build that relationship, I met with Andy Geisse a number of times. Andy was former CEO of AT&T Business and after he retired from his role, he joined the BroadSoft board. He was instrumental in our growth strategy and continues to be a close friend.

As we planned to deploy at AT&T, Andy felt it was critical for us to build a stronger set of relationships across the executive team. He sponsored a meeting with one of his colleagues. This was meant to be a small, informal meeting with just the three of us. The goal was to get to know each other and answer any questions or concerns he had around BroadSoft.

We met in Andy’s office and I realized that this executive had my bio in front of him, including a picture of me. I introduced myself and as we started to talk, the executive took out his pen and started to doodle on my face. I’m not kidding. He had a pen and drew a mustache on my face. He then moved on to using his pen to darkening my glasses and adding more hair on my head. This was truly a first. 

To be honest, I have had lots of things happen at meetings that threw me off but this was a new one. At one point during the meeting, I remember looking at Andy and him looking at me with a completely puzzled look. This was new for both of us. 

The good news was that I must have passed the meeting because we went on to doing a number of very interesting projects with AT&T. For example, AT&T uses BroadWorks for SIP trunking and has the largest number of enterprise SIP trunks in production globally. 

Share with us some of the strangest things that have happened in a meeting. Many more interesting customer meeting stories to come in future blogs. If the BroadSoft team would like to suggest one, I would be happy to write it.