I’ve now passed the halfway stage of my placement at Intelliflo and 7 months down the line I’ve learnt a lot. I’ve been working within the marketing department for two months now and have had some truly unique experiences. It’s again been a great learning curve for me so far, being completely the opposite from the Finance department! I’ve had to adapt quickly, developing new skillsets, using new pieces of software and taking on a lot of responsibility.
Marketing
Some of the many projects I’ve been working on since joining the Marketing department include creating an app for our ‘Change the game’ conferences, getting involved in social media, managing the budget, reporting and analysing on the departments performance and learning how to code and send customised emails through our marketing platform HubSpot. One of the main differences between the Marketing and Finance departments is the way they work. In Finance it was very focused on one or two projects, completing them and then moving on, which was great as I really enjoy seeing a task all the way through from start to finish. In Marketing, things work a little differently, numerous projects are taken on at one time and you need to balance your time between them effectively. This alternate way of working has greatly improved my time management and organisational skills, adaptability being a key skill needed here, and something that I have definitely improved upon.
Being a very numerical person, the Finance department suited me perfectly, one thing I’ve found in the Marketing department is I have really improved upon my weaknesses, writing being the main one (a few months ago I would never have dreamed about writing a blog). I have however noticed how much analytics and logical thinking is required in any department. Two skills I believe to be key strengths of mine, but are also incredibly important for anyone working in Intelliflo, a business revolving around data.
My knowledge of Salesforce (CRM) has skyrocketed over the last month, having created numerous reports for the Marketing department informing them of their performance, all displayed on a dashboard to see on demand. This was a great achievement for me, harnessing my logical thinking and problem solving skills I turned something that used to take a couple of hours into an automatic weekly email informing the team how many new business enquiries we have generated.
For the remainder of my time in Marketing, I hope to continue automating as much of the manual work as possible, meaning my work can keep getting done without me. Whilst I move to the Customer support team in June, I will continue assisting Marketing in the run up to the conferences with the development of the App, ensuring attendees have access to all the information they need via their mobile devices.
I ‘wrap up’ the second part of my blog with a big thank you for reading. Please look out for my next update before I go back to University for my final year in September.
Sam
