Simon Smith - "I get to work with some of the greatest brains in the South West"

Job Title: Sales Director

Company: GOSS Interactive

Website: www.gossinteractive.com

Find out more about Simon Smith at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simondcsmith

GOSS is a digital platform service provider. We work with around 90 central and local government organisations as well as housing associations, national travel companies, the NHS and the Met Office, and a large home building company providing digital platform, online self-service platform solutions and professional services.

We call what we do 'delivering living services' because often they are an online lifeline between people and organisations. People depend on our clients' businesses and our clients depend on our systems.

GOSS solutions can save our clients money and time. To call a switchboard with a query can cost an organisation more than 15 times what an online query can cost. Our online systems allow citizens to help themselves rather than have to be helped. We like to think that we create seamless engagement between people and the organisation.

I was in the navy for 6 years, living the dream and travelling all over the globe. After I left the navy my wife and I ran a pub for a few years but once children came along I moved into sales. My first role was selling photocopiers (for a chap who used to come into our pub) I ended up selling copiers for 12 years before moving into software sales. 

On route to my interview with GOSS I called an old colleague who worked in the software development and I asked him about the company.He said that they were a great bunch of guys with a great reputation and a great product. Nine years later I can confirm he was right.

I get to work with some of the greatest brains inthe South West – we are very lucky.

In my experience people buy from people and I am confident that if you rang one of our clients about working with us they would have nice things to say. We really value our working relationships.

We have year-on-year growth and as innovators we are constantly pushing boundaries. We innovate to ensure that we maintain our position as the preferred digital self-service platform.

Websites are a key way for most people to interact with a business so we pay real attention to the user experience, we think about the user and how they can best experience the solution. We create a uniform look and feel even when we are working with a plethora of legacy systems. We create a joined up user experience, users can track previous communications and we know that it is often keeping people notified that really cuts down on costs as about 60% of calls to local council call centres are 'what happened to..' types of question, following up earlier communications. Our systems can help reduce these calls.

Our CEO (Rob McCarthy) calls the internet the Wild West - it is full of people doing bad things. 

I spoke at the first Bramble Technology Interchange event about the GOSS Self-Service Platform. It was great to meet with other SME's who are specialist in their fields and to see how we might work together. It gives us an opportunity to understand what our framework partners do and to meet and connect with credible people.

We really value our partner relationships – it's a tough market at the moment – and we plan to grow and develop every year.

We originally started working with Bramble Hub because there was a framework that we wanted to be on – but working with Bramble we were able to get on it. We have been Bramble Partners for over five years now and they have been an ideal strategic partner with lots of great contacts

My advice to a small SME wanting to grow is to remember that people buy from people so always be honest and upfront. Our clients understand that sometimes things will go wrong but they are reassured that when it does we will deal with it sensibly.

I asked our founder, Rob about the best business advice he would give to a new or growing SME and he said to remember that “ products sell better than bespoke development".

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Goss Interactive

The GOSS team of highly experienced channel shift consultants help public sector organisations to implement web, mobile & social strategies that deliver the best possible results.