How I Left My Comfort Zone

Marketing is a very important process in any organisation as its role is to connect the organisation with customers and vice-versa. The marketing department aims to identify customer needs/wants and market trends, promote the company’s products and services to consumers and to maintain long-term relationships with consumers and other companies. All of these activities require good skills as the right strategies need to be applied in order to satisfy customers.

Before joining PRODT as an intern, I had very little idea of what marketing is or its process. Being an 18 year school pass-out, I had no experience or professional degree for joining PRODT as an intern, however Sanjeev showed faith in me and offered me a position in the organisation. My initial days involved conducting communication and blog reviews, which I was able to do effectively. My strength was the command over English and this allowed me to improve the team’s communication and blogs by providing consistent feedback. In 2 months, our team was able to produce numerous technical blogs which are being posted every week on our website. I enjoyed my role in the company, however was dissatisfied as I wanted a role which required me to go outside my comfort zone. That’s how I approached Manas and he recommended me to assist him in marketing activities to help boost the company’s sphere of influence.

I was very hesitant to choose this new role as I had no skill nor experience in business marketing. Despite all the apprehensions, I chose the role as I had the opportunity to learn something entirely new. For my marketing activities, I was tasked with the responsibility of building a sales funnel and handling our company’s LinkedIn page. A sales funnel is a marketing model which maps out the journey taken by a potential customer towards the purchase of a company’s goods or services. My responsibilities involved building the foundations of the sales funnel, where I was supposed to research for customer names (companies) and fill in details like their sales values, net profit, contact person, LinkedIn profile, etc. The researched companies were divided into two areas of focus, one for No-code development and one for DevOps. 10 companies were researched everyday and this allowed Manas to begin cold calling with these people, thus speeding up the lead generation process. 

My other role was handling PRODT’s LinkedIn account and page. I took over this job when the account’s follower count was in the mid-100s and our goal was to increase the follower count to 1000. To increase engagement, we had to consistently post and share content onto our page. We decided to post microcontent. As the name suggests, microcontent is any form of content which can be consumed in less than a minute. Microcontent is generally used to give the audience a representation of a larger piece of work (for e.g. blogs, articles, novels, etc.). It can also be used to convey pieces of information that answer questions or leave a long-lasting impression on the audience. Initially, engagement was low, however, as the amount of content increased, more people were attracted to our page. With consistent blog and microcontent posts going out, our follower count has hit 950 in 3 months, and we are on track with our goal. 

Overall, I have enjoyed my new roles in the company. I was looking for activities to help me get out of my comfort zone and the new roles have helped me do so. The more you challenge yourself and succeed, the greater your confidence in your ability to do it again next time. Challenge doesn't just help you grow your skills and knowledge, it helps you grow your belief that you can!