When Harry Met Sally

Maybe Adrina's message below her signature on her CD liner came true today at long last. There is light at the end of the tunnel. I had a huge breakthrough today with a client who has been polite, but difficult over these past few months. The client has various in-store television advertising network packages it sells, and my task was to trot out new media codes I had developed for them and compare the resulting reach and frequency numbers that now come out of our systems with their "bible" of a spreadsheet they sent me (which even they agreed made a couple of invalid assumptions in the calculations, simply for expediency in crunching out the numbers across so many demographics, so it wasn't really gospel, but more like "shoot for something close to this").

This was a conference call with our salesperson and me in NY, our LA sales rep on the account, and the top two research people at the client. The bulk of the numbers discussion zoomed over the salespeople's heads like an ICBM, but the research people at the client and I were on the same page. They were absolutely thrilled with the numbers they saw. The head research guy was all joking and almost giddy with delight . . . I've never heard him quite like that before. Heck, we were even joking about where I was going on vacation next week, and it turns out the head research guy is from Rhode Island, so he knows all about New England seaport towns. Our NY saleswoman was high fiving me, which was funny, because she missed half the numbers discussion at the beginning, and was there mostly for the live demo of it in action.

I know the head research guy there had a lot riding on making this thing work, careerwise. I looked at our NY saleswoman while he was joking away, saying how great this is, etc., pointed to the phone, and said "I'll have what he's having."

The NY saleswoman's boss from Toronto was in NY today, and couldn't make the meeting after we pushed it back half an hour from the originally scheduled time to give the client time to digest the numbers we sent, but accosted me in the washroom later to congratulate me. As far as I'm concerned, she had no real interest in any of the details other than knowing that I saved her ass today from losing a $130,000 contract. That's a salesperson for you.

From my perspective, we as a company, maintained our integrity in working with them to produce the right numbers, and were far more transparent with them about how we went about it than our competitor was, when it tried the same thing for them earlier this year. Obviously, the transparency on our part helps tremendously with the client's comfort level in working with us.

Worked with the folks in Database and Distribution to merge my media codes for the client with the ones from the parent syndicated database to release a special version for just this client, so they see all the original media codes, plus mine for their network, tested it on my machine, and turned it over to the sales and support folks in our LA office to beam out to the client.

My boss next door heard almost the entire conference call through the paper thin wall, so he knew it went well, but I had to stop by to let him know that everything is out of our hands, and ready for the LA people to worry about as far as installation at the client this afternoon. I left at 5:00 today. I deserved it. My boss agreed. As of 5:00 tomorrow, I am officially on vacation.

We don't have an early closing before the holiday weekend, but my boss told me he was leaving at 1:00, taking a "Summer Friday," and that I could if I wanted as well. It really depends on my workload, but I'm tempted to take him up on it, maybe not at 1:00, but earlier than 5:00, if I can. I need to update my laptop computer's Firefox bookmarks with all the ones I have here for various blog sub-folder classifications, and make sure I have my Nikon software on it so that I can post pics from Mystic while on vacation rather than wait until we get back. Free hotel broadband rocks. I just hope it's wireless, because if it's a hard wire into a cable outlet, then between the two of us, we'll have to swap the cable back and forth between our laptops. Sharing is good, but I'd prefer to share a meal together with enough silverware for both of us, if you will, rather than trading off who uses the single fork provided with the meal. Now, there's an image!