CPB UK is keen to inspire young people and each summer we take on work experience students. We aim to provide them with insight into IT and marketing, to help them understand the running of a company, to give them experience of interacting with peers and clients, and to illustrate the mechanics of our industry and CPB’s place within that. This summer we were joined by Mary Branning, and these are her thoughts on her time with CPB.
My time at CPB by Mary Branning
During July 2023, I spent 4 days working with CPB for my school work experience.
CPB is an IT specialist marketing agency based in Banbury. They sell marketing services and data.
The services they sell are lead generation activities, TechKnow.Online enewsletter and email/mass marketing activities. CPB's unique and most significant differentiator is its database, ProspectaBase. CPB sell cuts of the data to their customers but also use it for all of their client marketing activities. The data is very clever as it contains information about a company’s IT set up. It is also very clean as the Call Room agents work hard to keep it fresh, while they make calls they add notes and information.
I spent my time at CPB working with different departments and shadowing various members of staff. I was also set tasks and exercises to complete which I really enjoyed.
I started the week by doing research on competitors, this was really interesting as I learnt loads more about IT marketing and it helped prove and show me how good CPB is.
What is CPB?
CPB's ultimate goal is to "cause people to buy" via traditional human to human telemarketing; picking up the phone and having a chat with end users, gaining an
understanding of their current set up, pain points and desires.
I then went on to shadow 4 senior members of the team to learn about their roles.
What I learnt with the Head of Account Management about what CPB does:
• Who CPB UK is
• What the IT channel is
• What is meant by IT infrastructure set up
• How to create proposal documents
• Editing spreadsheets in Excel
What I learnt with the Head of Service Delivery whilst shadowing her setting up and
reporting on campaigns:
Reporting on an email that was sent
How to work out expected days for the Account Managers Statement of Works
Finding lead reports in the CPB portals
How to prepare a report for TechKnow - one was an analytics PDF and the other was interactions in Excel.
What I learnt with the Call Room Team Leader whilst listening to cold calling telemarketing campaigns:
How to qualify a call
How to listen for key pieces of information from the clients
How to keep the CPB contact database up to date with new details
What I learnt with the Business Development Director whilst I shadowed her holding review meetings with her clients on Teams:
How to interact with clients
How to listen and gather information
The relevance of social media and digital advertising an
d made my own social banners for: CPB, telemarketing, data and digital
I was extremely nervous coming into CPB as I have never been in an office before and haven't yet had a job, but the team was so welcoming and friendly I felt comfortable and at ease straight away. I learnt a lot about how a small but successful business conducts itself and enjoyed spending time with different departments. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time at CPB, they are like a big family that I was very grateful to be a part of, even if it as
s just for a short time.
Thank you Mary – we enjoyed having you working at CPB and we hope you might come back one day!
