1Spatial : Sharing Success for Global Growth

It was Global Sales Kick Off time, with our financial year running from 1^st February. This time last year was the final big global get together in 2020 at our head offices in Cambridge before various shades of lockdown. 12 months later, it's the same smiles and enthusiasm - just remote and digital.

The sales kick off giving us a chance to reflect on the past year, plan for the next, and share real experiences and perspectives from across the globe. Geographically, we may have the same core products and tools to help our customers make sense of their data and improve its quality, but it is always fascinating to see the different examples across different geographies and verticals.

With innovation at the heart of our values, we were determined to still run a global sales kick off, despite the ongoing pandemic and restrictions.

Running a virtual event gave us lots of flexibility, and there were lots of ideas about what we could do to maximise its value. We needed to think about how to make it informative and captivating, get the right messages across and allow for constructive feedback, and how to give everyone the best platform to share their perspectives.

We decided to treat it like a conference using the platform Digital Leaders, and run it for an entire week. We asked people to free up half of their day to participate and share experiences and we recorded almost everything - pre and post event. This allowed the recordings to be shared globally to everyone across the company, including those who couldn't attend.

As well as the idea of digital content, we had to think hard about where people would sit (virtually).The platform was made up of a main stage, side lounges, tables, and chat streams. We wanted to encourage idea sharing and create a space for open conversations to identify areas for improvements. We decided to create different teams each day and group them by vertical industry, geography, and department to not only be creative, but also minimise our own blind spots. Playback sessions took place at the close of each day, allowing everyone to hear the great conversations across the various teams.

• Day One was all about setting the global priorities to ensure we all understood the company's goals and vision, from Claire (CEO) and Andy (CFO), as well as from Seb (CTO) and myself (CPO).
• Days Two to Four was where we got really focused in the vertical markets where we play (Government, Utilities and Transport), sharing experiences of our wins and losses, successes and failures from all our geographies.
• Day Five was when we shared new management tools and techniques that would help everyone, before we then got down to prioritising all our new ideas and planning how we test them all out to improve the business.

As with all our events (internal and external) - this one was fun and hard work. Everyone put in a huge amount of effort to get prepared (maybe even more prepared than usual with it being online) and participate. The teams were brilliant and full of great ideas and the outputs from the session are already making their way into the new FY objectives.

CEO Claire Milverton commented:'We are striving to make the world more sustainable, safer and smarter for the future. The sales kick off is a great way to collaborate across the globe, share examples of how we have helped customers unlock the value of their data and identify new ways of helping organisations achieve this.'

And lastly, you could tell that everyone felt good about it, as we finished with online bingo, and a few beers. As tends to happen at every 1Spatial event, we carried on much later than planned, well into the evening - always a good sign of a great event attended by great people.

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