A New Challenge

Prologue

Today I started a new challenge. It’s quite fair to say this could count as the start of the IV-th episode of my career. The first episode was a couple of years in the graphical industry as DTP-operator and Project leader in a Signage company. The second episode would be where I entered the IT world, working for VARs (value added reseller) as Systems Engineer, Implementation Consultant and TeamLead. In episode III, I primarily created technical marketing content or represented vendors at events.

Episode IV – A New Challenge

Today I will be joining D Square, a young Belgian software startup. Before today, all marketing actions were based on ‘best effort’ split beween all the people in the company. So here’s where I come in. I will help DSquare both building a marketing strategy as executing on it. Here are a couple key points we defined today:

• designing a short- and midterm marketing strategy
• aligning customer experience with company culture
• initiating a customer community for beta customers

People that have followed my blog so far know that I do wrote a lot about marketing strategy in the past. From rants on metric abuse to why community and influencers are important in my opinion. In the first three episodes I have mainly executed on strategies that were set by existing teams and leaders. This challenge will be the first time I will have the responsibility to design the corporate strategy myself. If now the field sales say “well, this is what marketing gave us” it’ll be on me 😉

#trendminer

D square has 2 activities; the first one is alarm management services for industrial plants in order to optimise the plant efficiency. Secondly they are a software company that is developing TrendMiner in stealth. I will primarily be focussing my attention to TrendMiner. The customer community for example needs to be an active platform by the time the product comes out of stealth. And the same applies for Wiki, FAQ, …

Closing notes

First of all I want to thank all my friends in the IT infrastructure community. I will be a lot less active in the coming weeks / months / … from your viewpoint. But who knows what’s next? So don’t forget about me just yet.

Secondly I want to thank Bert Baeck, my new CEO (and his team) for the trust they are putting in me. I know it’s a risk from their side to add someone to the team that is not all that familiar with their target industry.

Lastly I want to explicitly thank my wife, Lynn, my family and friends of all kinds that have been supportive during my quest for a new challenge.