Well, another jam packed week at the FT.

Monday, September 15, 2008

As I mentioned last week, I took part in 'the launch' this week. The launch is an event tied to our company induction, which gets new employees to spend 4 hours in a group, coming up with, planning out and then presenting a new product for the FT to a panel of senior FT staff.

I've been part of 3 or 4 of these now, this time leading it, and each and every time I'm amazed, given that these people are both new to the FT and don't know each other (they come from sales, IT, finance, editorial etc...) that they can come up with so many high quality ideas. Proves to me that the FT has a knack of always employing talented people.

The other thing I mentioned in my last post that took place this week was the M&M Europe Awards, and I'm pleased to be able to tell you that our client won. They scooped the award for 'best campaign within financial and consultancy sector' for their trading game, of which we were the media partner. On a personal note at the awards, I had a brilliant time and damn well murdered that dance floor. Reckon I'm getting too old for it now though as the recovery time spread into 2 days!

I also attended another event last week; the RightMedia Publishers breakfast forum.

RightMedia are a technology provider who, to cut a long story short, offer an eBay type model for trading online inventory. A very clever idea and it will catch on in a big way in 2010 (you read it here first) and I can see some real benefits to the FT for using it. As with all things, we'll need to be careful and smart about its application as we have a brand to protect and a yield to maintain, but its exactly the kind of thing we're going to need to be doing if we're going to grow at the level people would like us to.

Talking of growth, I got involved last week in our quarterly review of revenue and predictions for the remainder of the year. First time i've been involved and it was a real eye opener!

Aside from all of the above, a fairly normal week. This week promises a number of internal meetings looking at various departments and sectors (research, our travel category guys etc...), all with a view of looking at what's needed in terms of budget and what's achievable in terms of growth for 2009. We're about to enter op plan 2009 planning, so watch this space for lots of talk about numbers!

I'll leave you now with another video (don't get used to this, I won't be doing one every week!) which, for those of you either interested in or confused by the phenomenon, attempts to explain the wonder of 'web 2.0'. Enjoy.

Stu

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