On Monday 20th June, I start at Net Communities as the new Sales Director, taking the baton from the very capable Babac Vafaey.

I have been working in media since I left university (8 long years ago). In that time I have worked at a very hard telesales business which is a place I try to forget and most recently as a group sales manager for the online portfolio of sites at Reed Business Information (RBI), representing the 4 largest accounts across the entire business.

Why I have joined Net Communities? When I came in to meet Andy (the CEO) I explained what I was looking for in my next challenge but more importantly had heard some great feedback in the market about some of the interesting solutions Net Communities have been putting together. I’ll be very honest, when I first turned up I was taken aback slightly by the current size of the team, but let me tell you do not let this fool you, these guys are an exceptionally hard-working, passionate and dedicated team who are able to create amazing solutions.

As a result, the business is growing rapidly (so much so that the business is planning to taking new office space 3x the size of the existing premises). In addition to the twenty-plus (and fast growing) UK based staff; the business has an impressive worldwide network of employees, embracing outsourcing and to a degree their carbon footprint.

I had a long list of questions about how Net Communities sell, who they sell to but more importantly I wanted to get under the hood of the company values. I have always been very interested in putting client interests first, which sometimes clashed with the products previous employers might have wanted me to push. In this sense I wanted to clearly understand the position Net Communities took and the approach to all proposals and solutions they pitched to their client base.

So, it was very refreshing to hear Andy talk about “5 star service” (perhaps a little cheesy) but the sentiment is there and he wants to ensure each client goes away feeling they had the best possible service and more importantly their goals were achieved, which is very much my own mantra.

In talking around this, I was bought up to speed on some of the current solutions they have out there in the market such as www.IdealDayOut.com. I was pleasantly surprised at how they priced these types of solutions up, how quick they were to deliver and most importantly that they actually worked really well.

When producing these projects, it seems that once again, Net Communities are interested in the read experience first, but not at the cost of not working with the client. In essence, they were not charging for production, only for marketing these projects, so coming from a larger organisation and knowing how other organisations work, it was a shock to see no production costs just marketing. IdealDayOut.com was an amazing campaign that spread through the market via social media which meant not relying on traditional display so much (once again very unlike previous companies) and actually delivered greater numbers. So what impressed me was the innovative and deliverable metrics this campaign and others like it not only satisfied the client, but often excelled expectations.

It might seem I am rambling slightly and promoting Net Communities too much, but the reason for this is simple. I have seen how it is done at larger corporate organisations, so I was impressed at the approach of Net Communities. These were just a few of the reasons I decided to join Net Communities...

Having said that, for all their great solutions (from click to engaging solutions like IdealDayOut.com) I am sure I will find some things they do not do as well as the big boys, but one more great thing (in a long list) about Net Communities is that they are willing to look at everything, adapt, better themselves in order to strive towards the common goal of growth.

I’ll be blogging again soon on any new initiatives that I think will be helpful to the market and the next one will be shorter than this I’m sure.