Monday, September 8, 2008
Well, what a week.
The life of a sales person is never dull, and that was never more true than last week.
A week in which we saw the introduction of a brand new booking, delivery and billing system which revolutionised our business process, the team nominated for the AOP (association of online publishers) Sales Team of the Year (one of 5 sales, commercial and editorial awards we're up for) and finally closing the biggest ever deal in FT.com history!
I could say something horribly cheesey here like "they're all already winners in my eyes" but even I, Mr Cheddar, cringe a little at this one.
To put our new booking system into context for you, its only taken 3 (long, hard, challenging) months to get live, which is about half the normal amount of time needed for one of these projects, and it replaces 4 legacy systems, 5 manual inputs of the same data and over 390 individual line items. Booking times are reduced from about 2 hours to 10 mins. Revolutionary indeed and an example of how the FT is constantly striving to not only be the best, but to always have the best in terms of support and systems.
As for how are we doing from sales point of view - in general, the market remains tough but the quality, ability and ambition of the team means we're still performing very well, especially in context of the UK publishers in general. Last weeks deal (which I'll tell you more about once we've done the whole PR thing on it) should help a lot as its starts in November this year. Well done on this one guys.
This week promises to be another busy week, with another awards ceremony on Thursday (M&M Europe awards) where one our clients (BGi) have their trading game, to which we were media partner, up for a creativity award, followed by leading 'The Launch' on Thursday, which is a regular event at the FT which offers new starters the chance to meet people from other areas of the business and take part in a competition to create a new product for the FT. I've also got a number of internal and external meetings discussing subjects as diverse as a concierge service for FT.com users to Europe wide trading agreements.
As I said at the start, life is never dull!
I'll leave you now with a video that might be of interest. A light hearted look at collecting and then using data from you clients. Something we do, and do very successfully, but not to this extreme!
Speak to you next week.
Stu
The life of a sales person is never dull, and that was never more true than last week.
A week in which we saw the introduction of a brand new booking, delivery and billing system which revolutionised our business process, the team nominated for the AOP (association of online publishers) Sales Team of the Year (one of 5 sales, commercial and editorial awards we're up for) and finally closing the biggest ever deal in FT.com history!
I could say something horribly cheesey here like "they're all already winners in my eyes" but even I, Mr Cheddar, cringe a little at this one.
To put our new booking system into context for you, its only taken 3 (long, hard, challenging) months to get live, which is about half the normal amount of time needed for one of these projects, and it replaces 4 legacy systems, 5 manual inputs of the same data and over 390 individual line items. Booking times are reduced from about 2 hours to 10 mins. Revolutionary indeed and an example of how the FT is constantly striving to not only be the best, but to always have the best in terms of support and systems.
As for how are we doing from sales point of view - in general, the market remains tough but the quality, ability and ambition of the team means we're still performing very well, especially in context of the UK publishers in general. Last weeks deal (which I'll tell you more about once we've done the whole PR thing on it) should help a lot as its starts in November this year. Well done on this one guys.
This week promises to be another busy week, with another awards ceremony on Thursday (M&M Europe awards) where one our clients (BGi) have their trading game, to which we were media partner, up for a creativity award, followed by leading 'The Launch' on Thursday, which is a regular event at the FT which offers new starters the chance to meet people from other areas of the business and take part in a competition to create a new product for the FT. I've also got a number of internal and external meetings discussing subjects as diverse as a concierge service for FT.com users to Europe wide trading agreements.
As I said at the start, life is never dull!
I'll leave you now with a video that might be of interest. A light hearted look at collecting and then using data from you clients. Something we do, and do very successfully, but not to this extreme!
Speak to you next week.
Stu
posted by Stu Colman at
12:24 AM
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