Our ‘Profile: A Day in the Life of’ feature takes a look at some of the global professionals working across performance marketing. It aims to shed light on the varying roles and companies across the flourishing industry.
In this edition we head to London, to speak with the Chief Executive Officer at CloudSense, Richard Britton.
Name:
Richard Britton
Job title and company:
Chief Executive Officer, CloudSense
In one sentence, how would you describe what the company does?
CloudSense improves the customer transaction journey, bringing simplification, consistency and personal context across every channel during the order to invoice cycle, bridging the gap from sales to service.
What are the company’s unique selling points?
CloudSense offers the next generation of sophisticated order capture and order management. Designed and built in the cloud, our platforms deliver rapid, game-changing capability to customers, innovating their product ranges for growth and optimising fulfilment lifecycle for profitability. Our competitors offer out-dated commerce models, rooted in on premise ideas, delivering slower time to value.
Within the last six months/year, what stands out as the company’s major milestones?
In the last year CloudSense has expanded from Europe into North America; the biggest cloud market in the world. We have also secured backing and investment from a major technology investment fund, delivered growth ahead of market trends and expectations and our social media following has scaled exponentially.
Duration in current role:
I was one of the founders of CloudSense; we started in 2009.
Where are you based?
We have five offices in three continents and customers in 26 countries. Our HQ is in London but my role takes me all over.
What are your main job responsibilities?
My main responsibility is to lead a great team to deliver the CloudSense vision. We are a technology disruptor with significant success to date with global enterprises adopting our platforms. We plan to become a standard in next-generation ordering technology and the customer transaction lifecycle. So we set the bar high and I help the team achieve their targets. It is also my responsibility to help educate prospects, customers and industries around a better way of doing things that CloudSense can bring. I also spend a lot of my time working on our platform roadmaps and getting to the heart of where we need to take our business from a product capability perspective.
Take us through what you get up to on a typical working Monday:
A typical Monday starts around 0530 with some exercise. Then I review our marketing and sales performance dashboards in preparation for our start-the-week meetings. After breakfast with my family I am in the office by 0800 and usually start by having short calls or face time with each of my leadership team about the week ahead.
Then by 0930 I am into the busiest part of the day, which involves planning for and attending customer meetings, because I like to stay close to our customers – this helps me understand their needs. On Monday afternoons, after a light lunch, if I am not with a customer then I will be with our technical R&D leads working through the ideas on where our next-generation ordering capability is headed. I do try to limit the use of email in my day, so this does not factor strongly. I prefer open collaboration on social media around the issues of the day, most of which I do from my smart phone.
Unless there is a customer commitment then my day finishes around 8pm and I have dinner with my wife. Sometimes, with some good pre-planning, I also get to see my kids before they are all in bed.
What top three websites can you be found browsing during your lunch hour?
I tend not to browse websites so much as using apps. At the moment you’d probably find me on the Sky News app, RunKeeper or Salesforce1.
What are your top three tips for someone looking to get their hands on a job like yours?
Don’t spend your whole life wishing you’d started a company and worked for yourself. Get some experience under your belt so that you know your field of interest well, be brave, write a business plan and then let people you trust take pot shots at it, so it improves. Don’t try and do it all yourself, find the right business partners that you trust and add something you don’t have, then agree roles and a vision. Now pick your timing carefully, then leave your job and start.
Career-wise, where do you see yourself in three years’ time?
Running CloudSense, delivering the standard in next-generation ordering, helping our clients to improve their customer transaction lifecycles.
Tell us one thing people at work don’t know about you?
Before I got into technology, I was planning on becoming a geologist.