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3/8/09 Fourth Week

I started this week with a meeting with a specialist from Bing Maps. I’d emailed him in the previous week about an idea I had for customisable maps and he was keen to hear more. The meeting went well and he said they were already working on something similar to my idea however I’d put a new spin on it. It was a good feeling to know that an idea from even someone as non specialist and junior as I may have an effect on a massive product of Microsoft’s.

For the rest of the week I finalised my report on the sales and marketing pipeline project for my manager and thought about how I would now apply what I’d learnt in order to tackle some of the issues my team faced. My manager and I had decided the work I’d done on better qualifying the marketing leads and ensuring these are being exposed to the sales agents in the most appropriate way possible would be a good facet to approach first.

I ended the week in style after telling one of the members in my team that clearly he was too old to be cutting shapes on the dance floor and he should clearly outsource the job of entertaining his client to me. To my surprise at the end of the week he relented so I joined 5 other Microsoft representatives in taking 20 clients out for a night in London. This was a fantastic night and consisted of a limousine transfer from our swanky hotel to Jamie Oliver’s restaurant, 15 followed by VIP treatment at a club in London. I didn’t see much of my bed that night but my liver had certainly had enough of me by the end of the affair.

10/8/09 Busy week of work

Monday was spent planning my second event for the team, an offsite in a location of my choice, I’ve narrowed it down to Oxford University for meeting + drinks/tour or a classy cocktail bar in reading with meeting and cocktail master class. After meeting with the managers in the bars of Reading I think that idea is ahead by a whisker but nothings decided yet!

Tues-Thurs was spent mainly on meeting people from marketing and sales to see how we could better improve the leads and the process in which marketing leads in particular are handled. All very interesting and by Thursday afternoon we had a pretty good solution to how we were going to tackle some problems in the short term.

I also started my social media project by meeting a ‘social media guru’ from the marketing department to see how he thought we could use ‘sm’ to solve our problems, i left this meeting with more questions than answers.

Friday was spent in all day sessions called ‘Deep Dives’ where technical topics are explained in Laymen’s terms to goons like me who don’t have a technical bone in their body. What I did understand however was our competitors analysis and had some pretty grand ideas about how I was going to link this in with my work about my lead nurturing venture I’d planned. Next week’s going to be a good’en.

Colin