It looks like nonsense to you, but it means OH SO MUCH more to the members of SLales.

“.llli” is the international SoftLayer Sales symbol for *high five*, invoked when major deals are closed, or when hilarious jokes are made over the cube walls.
Here’s how it works: the period is the thumb, the three lower case Ls are the index, middle and ring finger, and the lower case I is the pinky. See it?

SoftLayer Sales are the big mouths of the company - we are louder, more boisterous and more interactive with our teammates than most of the other office departments, so high-fiving is pretty much a standard mode of communication. (I don’t think it hurts that pretty much everyone on the sales team was in a frat/sorority in college.)

Not everyone loves the high-five, though. When there’s a .llli session going on in the sales area, most others steer clear. When a potential high-fiver (read: Douglas Jackson) is hired, part of the training documentation includes a list of C-titles and VPs who you should not attempt to high five. Doug seems to specialize in getting people to high-five, knowing that they don’t want to.

Just another peek into the world in which we live. Come on sales chat sometime and give us a high five. Or make it a double:
illl. .llli

When we first opened our doors, Jeaves and Josh used to split 24-hour shifts in the DC to provide 24×7 support coverage, and there was a “napping couch” in the office for the occasional overnight work shift up in Plano. Most of us had a toothbrush if not a change of clothes in our desk drawer, and a fun Friday night entailed sitting around a whiteboard talking numbers, and coming up with new ideas for the datacenter.

Team SoftLayer is much much larger now, but the spirit is much the same. This picture is from a swingin’ SL party we had a few Thursdays ago, where the office got together to label power cables for the new Seattle DC. There are members of Dev, Sales, Accounting, Marketing, & Management here working together. It makes me so proud.

I’ve been working with Amanda, Daniel, Miller and Laude for a long time in a shared sales team environment. Until recently, it had never occurred to me how bizarre it is that five such independent and competitive sales people are able to drive the SoftLayer Sales Machine almost 24×7x365 as a single seamless entity.

How do we do this?

First and foremost, we get along with each other - The value of this statement only really hits home if you understand how much time we spend with one another. Splitting an almost 24×7 work-week between 5 people means that we all work a *lot* of hours. Overlapping schedules, late nights, the almost constant blackberry messaging back and forth. If I didn’t love these guys, this job would be impossible.

Great management - (Clearly, a shameless effort to suck up to the boss ^_^) Lance and Steven both have very hands-off management styles. They both give us “Just enough rope to hang [our]selves”, meaning that we get to do a whole lot on our own. This is why SL Sales is the most technically savvy and aware in the dedi server industry. It also means that we trust and lean heavily on one another to make sure we stay that way, and of course, don’t hang ourselves.

We share everything, good and bad - Think: commission checks as well as schedules. Sharing EVERYTHING drives us in a couple of different ways. Since our paychecks depend on how well we do as a whole, each of us is sure to give 110% at all times, because what’s better than a 110% paycheck if you can get it, right? Along the same lines, none of us wants to be singled out as the weakest link in the chain – competition holds us up and keeps us on our toes.

Finally, we all have different strengths and weaknesses - If you combine us all together, you have the perfect mixture of unfailing politeness & cool (Amanda), masterful jocularity (Daniel), world-renowned strength under pressure (Miller), finely-tuned professionalism (Laude), and my own studied protocol & firmness. So there’s not a customer in the world who can’t get along with at least one of us.

SL Sales (or “SLales” as Lance likes to call us) really works here – I can’t imagine it any other way.