Our ‘meet the team’ blogs give you some insight into how we go about our daily lives, making transformations (and miracles) happen for BrightGen customers. In the hot seat this month… Robyn Bechelet.
Give us an overview of your role and responsibilities
I joined BrightGen in early 2018 as a Consultant in the Business Success team. Our focus is on working with our customers on their overall business strategy and looking at their transformation from end to end. Right now, I’m leading the focus on BrightGen’s sustainability agenda, as one of the first cohort of people to be Salesforce Sustainability Cloud certified in the UK.
How did you get here?
My background is in media – I worked at Archant for 27 years before joining BrightGen. Archant Community Media publishes four daily newspapers, more than 50 weekly newspapers plus dozens of magazines and associated websites across the UK. Started out as a journalist but over my time there gained experience in roles including News Editor, Magazine Editor and Publisher, Editorial Development Director and finally as Platform Development Director. I saw first-hand many of the internal and external challenges facing news and magazine brands and also their customers’ businesses.
I worked closely with internal teams to enable more efficient and effective publishing through development of CRM and CMS systems. This meant listening and involving people across the business to document requirements for the team. An example of one of the major projects was an upgrade of the CRM system and then creating and implementing training programs for 550 salespeople. Leading the business and Super Users through such a major transformation was immensely satisfying, and it was great to see the effects at the publishing centres.
Other projects I experienced covered different topics, but they all came back to the basic principle – working with people to understand how to achieve positive change. Through continuous improvement and working with teams we made the change happen. Now I’m using my experience to help publishers connect advertisers with the right customers through the BrightMEDIA solution, which will lead to better product development in the publishing industry.
What’s been the biggest change or challenge so far?
It was essential for me to get more experience with the technology, so I started studying for the Salesforce Administrator Certification as soon as I arrived. I’m proud to say I passed! I couldn’t have done it without the team here. There’s a culture of learning and improvement. Everyone seems to be studying for their next cert, it’s a really positive working environment.
I’ve also been working my way through the Trailhead badges too. I am serious about continuous personal development.
So as a media professional, what are you early impressions of the Salesforce Ohana?
It will soothe a lot of daily pain for people in media sales who should find it a breeze to use systems to help their customers. I believe that it can help transform the publishing industry – who wouldn’t want the chance to contribute?
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