Sparkol behind the scenes: meet Alastair Lee

Naomi Linford Feb 1, 2022 2:02:34 PM

Welcome to our new blog series where we give you a sneak peek on life at Sparkol HQ!

We’re really proud of our team and the brilliant things they’re achieving, we thought it was only right you get to know us a bit better.

To kick this series off we sat down with Sparkol newbie, Alastair (Ali) Lee who recently joined us as a Sales Development Manager. Ali will be spreading the word about Sparkol and VideoScribe to marketers, educators and agencies and helping them use video to achieve their objectives.

So let’s get into the questions…

First things first, can you tell us a bit about your background and how you got started at Sparkol?

I actually kind of fell into business development straight after university. I emailed a local drinks distributor to ask if they had any jobs and only a couple of days later found myself hired as their UK Sales Manager.

Since then I knew sales was for me and I’ve worked in sales development in various sectors, but a lot of the roles were only UK focused and I was ready for a new challenge.

That international element was one of the major factors that attracted me to Sparkol, the fact we sell to 180 countries and we’re still growing into new markets. It’s a really exciting time to work here!

What does your typical working day look like?

Usually I cycle into the office for 9am - it takes around 25 minutes and I love it because it’s my time to myself and I’ll think about what I want to achieve that day.

At the moment I’m focused on having good conversations with our current and prospective customers, understanding strong markets and establishing healthy relationships. As I’m new to Sparkol I’m also getting to know the software inside and out and equipping myself with enough knowledge to tell the story of Sparkol’s products.

During the day I’ll often have catch ups with our marketing team and designers to collaborate on upcoming campaigns or check on how bespoke projects for customers are developing. It’s always fun to see how a customer’s brief comes alive in video!

What's the best part about working at Sparkol?

For me it’s the fact that Sparkol is growing and evolving which means I can evolve with it and have the freedom, support and flexibility to develop my current role as we change.

It’s also a very open company where you can get involved in lots of different projects, suggest new ways of working and have a real impact.

What's the the biggest lesson you've learnt here so far?

My knowledge of precise time-zones has probably increased 10-fold! Working with colleagues based all around the world means you have to get pretty good at communicating at the right time. In other words, not trying to video call when the other person hasn’t even woken up yet...

What do you get up to outside work?

I have a 9 month old daughter called Tiggy who consumes pretty much every spare minute that I’m not working.

But I’m not complaining, she’s ridiculously cute (not biased at all) and I love spending time with her and my wife.

Alastair Lee

What's something not many people know about you?

I’ve lived in four different countries - Canada, New Zealand, England and Wales!

Want to join Ali and the team at Sparkol? Check out our latest job vacancies here.