Forte new location as of November
The day has finally come. Friday it is time to pack those moving boxes and close the doors of our offices in the Voskenslaan for the last time. As of Tuesday November 2nd, we are taking a fresh start at our new location.
Easy to reach on the outskirts of Ghent
The new offices are located in Melle, close to Ghent. From now on, it will be even easier to reach us by car as the R4, E17 and E40 motorways are close by. We have plenty of parking space available.
Moreover, with a bus stop right in front of the building and a railway station at approximately 1,5 km it will still be easy to reach us by public transport.
Reception in style
We are moving to a charismatic building. This villa with its linear design dates back to the 1900s and was thoroughly restored by design architect Glenn Sestig in 1998. The result is a stylish and practically arranged office building surrounded by ancient trees. Undoubtedly, our upgraded surroundings will be a renewed source of inspiration. After its restoration, the building was voted one of the most striking Flemish office buildings by Knack magazine, and for good reason.
Our spacious offices are located on the first floor. The ground floor has three large meeting rooms, where we can welcome you in style.
Remember the address of our new location for your next visit!
Forte cvba
Brusselsesteenweg 197 / 9090 Melle
Jan Lagast teaches at Vlerick’s Executive Master Class in Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Create new businesses to grow your organisation (Oct 2010 – June 2011)
Jan Lagast, Forte’s senior marketing advisor, teaches part of this Executive Master Class.
The overall objectives of the programme are to:
- learn how to turn ideas into successful businesses;
- acquire state-of-the-art knowledge and best practices in innovation and entrepreneurship;
- understand how to create value and growth for your corporate business or start-up through innovation and entrepreneurship;
- learn how to write winning business plans and how these are evaluated;
- become an agent of entrepreneurial change within your organisation.
The programme consists of 12 core modules and 4 in-company coaching sessions.
Discover Vlerick’s EMC in Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Agoria hosts Forte workshops ‘Selling in the B2B World’
Selling in the B2B world: are you commercially opening the right door?
Or do you need an entry at a higher level in your customers’ organisation?
If you are a member of Agoria, you will discover the answer in the workshop given by Jan Lagast, B2B-marketing advisor for the Belgian industry since 1990. Five concrete examples from the industry, machine manufacturing and IT will bring you new insights. Five different situations, five different solutions. Looking for the root cause and the right tactics, targeting better sales results.
This workshop is free of charge and only open to Agoria members. It is given on six different locations in Belgium in September and October. The first session takes place on Monday September 6th in Ghent. You can register at Agoria Online.
Not an Agoria member? Perhaps this is the opportunity to become member?
More information on programme, dates and locations can be found on the Forte Website (in Dutch and French)
Agoria to promote Forte’s B2B Doctor services
Agoria is now promoting Forte’s B2B Doctor Sounding Board Session. Agoria members get a substantial member benefit, when they want to spar with one of Forte’s marketing advisors. Why they would want to do that? Because they want to get a second opinion on their B2B marketing plan. Or in order to get more grip on their business strategy. Or to avoid some of the lessons Forte already learned and ensure a succesful new product launch.
More info on Agoria at www.agoria.be.
Our Senior Marketing Advisor Jan Lagast was in Hanoi (Vietnam) from June 14 until June 23. His mission was to train Executive MBA students in Customer Relationship Management. The Forte methods Four Forces (about organizational decision taking) and Customer Beaching (for defining a sales-oriented communication plan) were much appreciated by the students — and immediately applied to their business. During the course, Jan also stressed the importance of networking, both in real life as well as on line.
More than 1000 clients for FunkyTime
Our daughter company Funky Development welcomed client number 1000 for its free web application FunkyTime. After hardly three months of promotion, it is clear that FunkyTime addresses a real need in the market. Some years ago, Forte started to develop its own application due to a lack of existing software that was answering our needs. Now our daughter company ensures that other freelancers and small enterprises can benefit from our investments.
Partnership between Agoria and Forte
Agoria, the federation for the technology sector, wants to assist its members in making better use of their market potential. To achieve this, the organization recommends Forte for advice and training in the field of industrial marketing and business communication. Forte’s unique combination of marketing and technology proved to be the decisive argument in reaching this partnership.
Members of Agoria receive a discount on Forte’s open courses as well as a discount on the B2B Doctor session providing feedback on their marketing ideas. Maybe this is the ideal time to join Agoria?
New Marketing Advisor at Forte
Since 4 May, Tom Vanderborght has reinforced our team. Previously, he worked as an engineer/marketer for an animal feed company where he successfully launched various products in an international B2B market. Currently, he is studying the Forte methods Customer Beaching (sales-oriented communication planning), Winsquare Messaging (win-win sales argumentation) and Effectree (effective story board in communication projects). By cross-fertilizing these methods with his experience he will be able to help our customers extend their client portfolio in the best way possible.
If you want to call in Tom’s services, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Our software daughter company FunkyDev is doing well with its first baby FunkyTime, a free web application for time registration and time sheet printing. More than 300 users have created an account in less than two months. That’s good news, of course. And it was also a great experience to launch a “real” product by and for ourselves. This has given us some great insights in how social media can be applied (or not) in a B2B environment. One of these experiments is a news site on FunkyTime and the creation of the Time & Material group on LinkedIn. Feel free to visit and join the debates.
More than 20% of FunkyTime users are Mac fans
Last month, Forte’s daughter company Funky Development launched its new baby: www.funkytime.eu, a free web environment that allows knowledge workers and management consultants to keep track of their production time, and print time sheets. Yesterday’s statistics showed already 230 users, of which almost 40% is actively using and not just peeking - we had prognosed to get at 10%, so that’s not bad at all.
A stunning 20% of our free accounts uses the Safari browser, which shows us that the Apple Macintosh computers are used by management consultants. Last weekend one of our Mac users told us “FunkyTime does exactly what I need. And it works so intuitive, that I thought it was designed for Mac in the first place”. FYI: it was designed for IE, Safari, Opera, Google Chrome, and Firefox.
