We are thrilled to announce that Gustav Andreasen has accepted the role of Director of Sales EMEAA. He has already hit the ground running after paternity leave, so we sat down with Gustav to learn more about his promotion and ambition for the EMEAA sales team.
Hello Gustav! So you’re in new role, but same work family, right? Can you talk a little bit about your work experience here at Avinode?
G: Yeah! I started here 6 years ago in sales, after working in a purchasing job. I started with the Scandinavian market and then I assumed responsibility for growing the content of the Asia market and the Africa market. And then basically I’ve had almost every market since, at one time or another. For the last 9 months I’ve been off on paternity leave, and now am jumping straight in to my new role as Sales Director.
Will the EMEAA (Europe, North Africa and the Middle East) market have a different focus from the markets you have been working with previously?
It all connects of course.
One of the good things about this job is you get to try to work in every market. You cover for people, like in Sweden when people go on maternity or paternity leave, which gives you the opportunity to learn new areas. The industry is not that big so you get to know the right people, which is important.
The Asia market has been slower, and smaller than we anticipated. But the Russia market has always been big for us. It’s a broker-driven market. It’s very centralized to Moscow, with a few in St. Petersburg. But it’s more centralized compared to Europe, which is more spread out across the big hubs.
What do you look forward to accomplishing in 2018?
One focus is to make sure that the sales team has everything they need to succeed. We have a good mix on the team; people that have been here since the beginning, and also new staff coming in. So it will be a focus for me to get everybody working as a team and to make sure that the older members share their knowledge with the new ones, and for me to provide the right tools for everyone to do the best job. I think an advantage being recruited internally is that I know the people very well so I know what they’re good at, and what they need to be able to excel.
And we are looking forward to bringing even more value to our members by growing the EMEAA market. We will also be active in introducing the whole Avinode ecosystem and make sure that our members can optimize all aspects of their workflow through Avinode. Our broker tool, TripManager, is a very big thing for us and we’ll continue to push this product in 2018.
What makes Avinode special / makes you want to stay?
I’ve never been at one place as long as I’ve been here, it’s been 6 years. It doesn’t sound that long, but it’s still quite long in this industry. Avinode has a nice atmosphere and I know everybody really well. We have an open space here so you can go and talk to anyone and everyone is always helpful and that’s really important. Everybody’s emptying the dishwasher, the CEO does it and the new guy does it. That’s one thing that I like a lot about this company. And at the same time Avinode has given me the opportunity to travel the world, to see a lot of different things, to experience strange and cool things, and meet interesting people. So the sky’s the limit. I was studying in Australia for four and a half years, and I always wanted to work in an international environment. And growing up in Gothenburg, there’s not that many opportunities, so this job is quite special like that. And of course we always have a lot of fun too.