Discovering the Dojo – Sophie Hamoir

I am currently following a master in Business Administration at the La Rochelle Business School (France), and I was looking for an internship in the UK, starting in January. In France, recruiters highly value internships, and I want to discover English culture, so I have joined Market Dojo in their marketing team.

My personal experience at Market Dojo:

I started my internship by learning about the company and I discovered in detail the first B2B company (Business-to-Business) I have ever worked with. First, I learnt that the goal of Market Dojo is to help procurement professionals to streamline the collection of information and negotiation with suppliers. It did take me some time to understand this first idea. I had to understand the concept of procurement and try to translate and learn it in French, before learning all the new vocabulary in English.

After this part of learning about the market and the meaning of procurement, I attempted to understand Market Dojo further. That is to say its philosophy, its strategy, and above all, its different products:

• Market Dojo – An eSourcing tool which enables organisations to negotiate with suppliers online with different features like reverse auctions and questionnaires, in an easy to use tool.
• Category Dojo – A web application which analyses, compares, prioritises and highlights savings opportunities.
• Innovation Dojo – A creative way to collaborate with suppliers on new ideas within an innovative portal.
• SIM Dojo – A tool to improve efficiency and visibility of suppliers during the onboarding process.
• Quick Quotes – A quick intuitive solution to centralise information and save time and money.
• Enterprise – A solution for procurement professionals to centralise information in a unique interface to negotiate goods and services.

Embrace the meaning of the different products wasn’t as difficult as I was expecting, thanks to all the team who was ready to explain me what they do (in the many times as I asked!) and the intuitive conception of the product to breakdown complex procurement processes.
I arrived in a small company that was evolving into an easy-to-use software that could help any procurement professional in a number of ways.

My involvement with the marketing team:

My main goal here is to create an entire international simple web page. The aim is to explain clearly (in all languages, except English) Market Dojo. I speak three languages fluently and I can bring fresh thinking to the design of the webpage, that’s why I’m in charge of the project launch. So, I have to start by thinking of the presentation and the content. Now, with Craig and Toby, we must see if it is possible to convert my vision from paper to webpage. Then, together with Marcin, who speaks French as his mother tongue, we will translate it.

I’m also completing many smaller actions like thinking about some design for the website, for events, putting some blogs online, and so on. I worked with Toby on this design:

All those tasks give me the opportunity to meet all the different teams of Market Dojo. The most recent was to write a little paragraph on the Customer Success Management, the Co-founders, the Marketing, the Business Development, the Customer Support, and the Development teams for the web page.

Last week I finally met the last people of Market Dojo who don’t work in this office during the “Team Meet”. It’s a day, every month, to review what we have done, where we are and what we have to do. The benefit for me was to understand the importance of each department and their connections.
I’m looking forward to progressing my skills in marketing and more generally in the business environment.

So, how could I describe my internship in 3 words?

I will say “Fun, Learning and Bacon”.
Fun because the Market Dojo people are always smiling and enjoying their job.
Learning for all that I have discovered and all things they teach me.
And finally, bacon. Thanks to Craig I discovered the incredible taste of bacon!