Head of Sales at Clekt, James Springham, reflects on his first exciting month at Clekt, albeit in unusual circumstances. Joining Clekt was a big career move for James after his 5 years experience at Poq but he’s already realised it was a great decision.
It’s now been almost a month since I joined the team at Clekt as the 3rd official employee. If I’m honest, I didn’t envisage jumping back into a startup environment after being involved in the growth of Poq for the last 5 years, but it turned out to be an easy decision, and I’ll explain why.
Not your typical start up
Firstly, Clekt is a new business, but not your typical start up. The team that has been assembled have vast experience in the data space and a wealth of successful projects behind them, which is rare for a new company.
In addition, I was really impressed by the Exec team including the CEO Andy Tudor (formerly CIO at Monsoon), Chairman Alan Morris (Founder of Retail Assist), and Ian Cray who has decades of data experience (hopefully he won’t mind me saying this!) as our CTO. They all intrinsically understand this space, what our customers need and how to scale a business.
When evaluating any opportunity, the team behind it is massively important, and you couldn’t wish for more expertise and experience.
A unique opportunity
Clekt is also tapping into a massive market opportunity, making working for them a unique experience. From my background working in the retail sector for the past 6 years, both with retailers directly and technology partners, I’ve seen an increasing volume of data being generated. But this hasn’t always translated into better insights, faster innovation through the adoption of new technology or a customer experience that has actually improved. This is a challenge not just for retailers, but in most sectors. It’s no surprise that 73% of company data is unused.
This really shouldn’t be the case, arguably alongside the Product, data should be one of a business’s biggest assets, and help to inform decisions across the organisation.
Getting access to the right data will become even more important as customer demands rapidly evolve, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated this. Data enables us to test and learn rapidly, to get immediate feedback and evolve strategy quickly.
Knowledge, ambition and drive is so impressive
Research from Splunk shows the opportunity is well understood – 81% of people agree that the future success of their organisation is dependent on being data driven, but 56% believe that “data driven” is just a slogan at their business.
One big challenge for businesses is that there is almost too much data, but so much of it is stuck in disparate systems (many of which are legacy), so until now it’s been expensive and time consuming to collate all company data, both operational and analytical, into one place where it can be useful.
It’s precisely these challenges that Clekt has launched to solve, and help businesses unlock their data opportunity.
Joining a new company during lockdown has been a strange experience, but the knowledge, ambition and drive of the Clekt team is so impressive, and from some exciting conversations already with both retailers and partners, the market opportunity is even bigger than I thought!
