Hey, this is Malte with Vectorworks, how are you?

Calling customers, moving our sales territories project forward and have some fun on the week-end. The exciting time in Columbia goes on!

Cold calling for a hot reason: great keynotes at our Design Summit!

Vectorworks is well known for their close and very personal customer relationships. After I had the chance to gain some insight into the daily business of our sales representatives, Josh told me that it is now time for me to make my first prospecting calls. He pulled a list of customers which live in and around Arizona. Why Arizona? Because we are going to host our annual Design Summit in Phoenix, AZ from the 4th till the 6th of November and it was my task to make sure everyone is personally invited to join us and that no one is missed. The Design Summit is all about building relationships within the industry, offering educational and breakout sessions, as well as great keynote speakers by our top Vectorworks users and evangelists about latest tools and future technologies.

At first, I honestly felt a bit uncomfortable cold calling customer in a foreign language but also saw this as a great experience to gather people skills and practice my English.

Four equal strong sales territories

The sales project that I have been working on since my first week in Columbia, has reached the next project stage. After I prepared the data and developed a KPI that includes the current performance and potential of each state in the US, I started to decide about the territories on the basis of my developed KPI which I call “VoS” (Value of State). Now I was able to divide the US into four equal strong territories and I started to visualize my results. Furthermore, I added some data about the most important tradeshows, fairs, and conventions for each industry to my territory map by researching and synchronizing my list with the expectations and knowledge of the architecture and entertainment team managers. For the visualization, I was supposed to use Tableau, a tool that is able to import various data sources and visualize them in a very clear way. I didn’t have any previous experience in Tableau, so I started educating myself by watching different “get started” videos and reading through different user forums and customer support requests.

Friday, I joined Josh and his family to dinner for pizza and live music in Columbia. I spent my Saturday working on my university paper, a little bike trip, and a sporty round of basketball in the hotel yard.

Let the games begin!

Sunday was the day I had looked forward to all week; Linda organized to take me and a few other colleagues to a preseason ice hockey game of the Washington Capitals against the St. Louis Blues at the Capital One arena. Linda picked me up and we drove to D.C. meeting with Nicole and her family, Mark (Director of System Developments), Genevieve (Sales Program Coordinator) and her brother in front of the arena.

We watched a great game with good tackles, highly intensive, and a lot of goals. The Caps won the game 5:2! All in all, a very successful week with a great end!

Finishing and presenting

My first October week was all about finishing the sales territories and creating the presentation for the leadership team. I discussed with Josh my current version of the presentation and he provided feedback for a few edits. The next step is to present the revised presentation to our architecture and entertainment team managers Matt and Mike. I am really looking forward to their comments and suggestions. I hope to give my final presentation in the end of October/ beginning of November to the whole executive team and the key stakeholder.