ON THE PATH OF UNMISTAKABLE WOMEN’S INTUITION

1. BOJANA, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

After the bombing I returned from Canada, where I had spent one and a half years. But, I didn’t want to stay in the country which, at that moment, after the wars, sanctions and bombing, was infamous and where everything seemed hopeless to a young person. I returned to my country with an idea to apply for a permanent residence visa as soon as possible and leave for good.

In the meantime, in May 2000, while I was still in the country, my former executive from Mobtel called and offered me a job at HR department. I accepted. We agreed that I would start working the following Monday.

The period I spent in BK Group as an HR specialist was the only period in my career when I practised my profession as a graduate psychologist.

At the same time, my dog’s vet called me and said en passant that he was treating a dog of a certain Dejan Petrović, and that he and his sister-in-law Nataša Vušković needed a help in the sales department of Alma Quattro. He said that it would be great for me to start working there, because Nataša had a similar taste in music like me and liked going out.

“Well, we are not going to have fun and go out, but to work together. Besides, I start working in Mobtel next Monday.”

Nevertheless, I called Nataša and she scheduled an interview with general manager Kosanče Dimitrijević.

I thought: “Oh my God, who’s that man and who gave him such an unusual name?”

I went to the interview totally relaxed, unconcerned, and without any expectations.

It turned out that Kosanče Dimitrijević was a cosmopolitan person, a charming, cultured, well-mannered, educated, gray-haired professional who really impressed me during the first conversation.

When I was leaving his office, I shut the door so hard that I was convinced that he would never call me again.

Woe, they haven’t even hired me and I have almost broken something in the company.

However, to my surprise, two days later the secretary called me to come for the second interview. During that conversation Sanče told me that, after having much consideration, they concluded that I seemed to be the right person for that job. He asked me in his usual fashion: “What do you think about that?”

Impulsively and without thorough reflection I said “YES”. At that moment the intuition that is usually attributed to women and animals was activated.

Never in my life have I made such an important decision in that manner.

When I left the office I thought that I was out of my mind.

What was I thinking? I start working in another company on Monday morning. How am I supposed to tell that lady that I am not coming to work on Monday?

It was one of the most unpleasant conversations in my life. Nevertheless, the manager wished me all the best wishing me luck if it would be the best option for me in my opinion. It turned out that it really was.

On 1st June 2000 I officially started working in Alma Quattro.

2. ALWAYS COUNT YOUR CASH

My job was quite different from the one I had in Mobtel. Nataša and I did everything. From making coffee to taking transfer orders to the Social Accounting Office (Payment Operations Office). My first task was to paste stickers on tins for Blow UP advertising festival, which was held on Kopaonik in 2000.

While performing that task my train of thought was something like this: “Oh, my God! Bojana, what were you thinking? You could have worked in your profession in the other company, but no, you rushed and now look what you’re doing? Pasting stickers.”

On the one hand, such division of labour or rather the absence of it was necessary, because everybody was doing everything; on the other hand, it was the corporate policy that a person should start from the simplest tasks in order to learn the whole business process.

I can gladly say that I have learnt and understood how stickers are pasted and that I haven’t done it any more.

As for payment orders and cash withdrawal, I also had to learn another lesson for beginners:

Always count your cash…

Only a month after I had started working in Alma, I was sent to SDK (the Social Accounting Service, now the Payment Operations Office) to withdraw some money with a payment order. The amount was significant. I took the money and delivered it to the company, but Sanče called me and said that 10,000 dinars were missing, which was a big amount in 2000.

I had barely started working here. Nobody knew what kind of a person I was. I wished I could disappear. Such a reputation I had! I had worked in the company only a month and I found myself in a situation that people suspected that I was a thief?

Nevertheless, Sanče didn’t find me guilty without evidence. I was “repaying” that money in instalments, and they later found out what had actually happened and that it hadn’t been my fault.

I paid for the lack of experience and lack of understanding procedures. From that moment, every time I give money to someone, I insist that he or she count it immediately.

The good news was that from that moment everything started to get better. Sanče was my mentor. He taught me how to communicate with clients, how to take my stand when selling, how to start a meeting, break the ice, establish a transfer with a client. I modelled all the selling skills after him and adjusted them to my sensibility.

In the beginning I attended meetings only as an observer, to learn. Later I was given an opportunity to take part in meetings, and as the time passed, to held meetings independently. First with clients and later with agencies as well.

There is always something to be learnt, because selling is a “living matter”. You have never sold everything, there is always something left to sell.

3. SALES DEPARTMENT IS THE FRONT LINE OF THE BATTLE

The role of the sales department is to be the front line in defending the company’s integrity. We are the ones who communicate with clients. If something goes wrong, they don’t call the technical team or the financial department, but us, which is understandable.

That’s why Monday is some kind of a moment of truth in our business, because campaigns are posted in the night between Monday and Sunday. If there’s a problem, all telephones ring on Monday morning.

Our role is to prevent and resolve a conflict. Therefore, it is important that everybody who works at the sales department is trained and that’s why we invest in our employees through professional training and education in order to improve their communication skills constantly.

The characteristics I find to be crucial are empathy and precision. Empathy in the sense of our capability to put ourselves into the client’s position and understand his needs and abilities. Precision means that a company like AQ, which is a service provider, cannot allow high standard deviations. This is the business that requires promptness and precision.

Even when a client comes to us through an agency, we will try to have a direct contact with him, because nobody can represent and sell our product better than we can.

Sometimes such an approach can be misunderstood, but in time all the parties realise that everything we do is in the best interest of our clients and, therefore, in the best interest of all of us, as the participants in the sales transaction.

I had my “rite of passage” with one big company specialised in production of non-alcoholic beverages, which bought (rented) the advertising space for the campaign that was supposed to be on billboards along the route from the airport to the company, and the occasion was the visit of directors from their US head office. Since we cannot risk the safety of our men who put up posters at the height of over 20 m when the weather is bad, there was tension whether the campaign would be posted on time.

Of course, everything was done within the agreed period, but the situation was heated, just like my ear after numerous phone calls and conversations with the client, then with the guys from the technical team, and again with the client. I thought I had a temperature.

Once you have had such “rite of passage” or baptism by fire, you find it easier to recall and reactivate these mechanisms later in all other similar situations.

And all the situations of that kind are similar to some extent.

An ideal client is a big company with the elaborated marketing strategy and plan, while more challenging clients are those who cannot define their requirements or clients with very limited budgets and very high expectations.

Then it is a challenge to reconcile desires with actual capabilities.

4. BLIND SELLING

OOH will have a significant role in the future of advertising. We will not experience the destiny of a mammoth. Digitalisation erases boundaries between different media in their traditional form and the media are being fused. To that effect OOH will evolve like everywhere in the world: to be a trigger in the synergy with online advertising. On the other hand, I don’t think that traditional OOH analogue formats will disappear. Not only because the capital investment for their replacement is too high to be justified, but also because technology is changing too fast and OOH cannot follow every single change. Lastly, I think that whenever the pendulum swings forth to far, it has to swing back in order to create some kind of balance. We are facing the time when we will evaluate digitalisation advantages and disadvantages in order to find an appropriate measure.

As for the power of Alma’s brand, instead of giving my personal opinion, I shall tell you one anecdote:

We installed the first LED media in the pedestrian zone of Knez Mihailova Street at the end of 2017, around St. Nicholas day However, we sold the entire network capacity even before a single medium was installed. I would like to point out that we didn’t sell online and clients couldn’t see what they were buying. Clients didn’t know how the new media would look like, but they still bought (rented) them.

We sold out the entire network owing to our reputation, trust, and selling capabilities of our team. You can see the power of one brand in situations like this one.

On the other hand, building such trust required painstaking efforts. Years of hard work, consistency in action and principles. I know that among agencies we have the reputation of a “straight” company, with which unprincipled deals cannot be made. I think that such consistency enabled our company to survive various critical situations and periods. In the short run, sometimes it was more difficult and it seemed that those who were swaying in the winds had better outcome. Now when I look back, after 25 years, the time proved that we were right in the long run.

As a result, November 2018 was the most profitable November in the history of our company regarding the sale. The investment in trust building pays off and the results of good work are always evident somewhere and in our case they are evident in sales increase and in financial statements.