A day in the life

Trade

Rachel Coffey is sales manager for Hibernia Computer Services, a reseller based in Ballsbridge

Just enough time to collect my thoughts and get some much needed caffeine into the system before the 8.30am weekly sales meeting. Our month-end has just been completed and this will be my opportunity to go through the ups and downs of the previous month’s performance. Being August, things normally tend to be a bit quieter, but this year sales are still buoyant and this is definitely a strong indicator that things are continuing to improve in the technology sector.

An hour later, with the meeting complete, I can now concentrate on the rest of the day’s activities. I spend the next hour sorting out as many e-mails as I can and finishing off some administration tasks from the previous day. Having worked in the IT industry for over 10 years, I believe that one of the biggest revolutions in user-friendly technology has to be e-mail. However, the downside of e-mail is now becoming apparent with spam, ‘phishing’ and the multitude of viruses that are being delivered to corporate e-mail accounts. In the last two years I have seen a huge increase in spam, which is making it much more difficult to conduct serious business via e-mail.
Working in a small company can be a challenge for a sales manager in terms of the variety of jobs that come under my remit. Not only do I need to manage some of the company’s larger accounts, prospect for new business and actively support the sales team
in helping them achieve their targets, but I also need to keep all our vendor and supplier relationships up to date.

My first external meeting of the day, at 10.30am, is with one of our larger vendor partners, HP. As Hibernia is a Tier 1 HP Business Partner, part of my responsibility is to maintain the company’s business relationship with HP and as such I have weekly meetings with our HP account manager. The HP/Compaq merger caused a few headaches in the industry, but two years down the road things are eventually settling down. We had to spend a lot of time reassuring customers with regards to product continuity and support but, due in part to the strong relationships we have with our clients, it turned out to be a fairly seamless transition for them. I am currently concentrating on renewing our sales certification with HP and it is akin to filling out a CAO form: loads of choice but lots of agonising over where to put your tick and which course to pursue.

All of our major partners require us to recertify each year on the sales and technical side of the business and it is time-consuming in terms of attending courses, study leave and sitting exams. It is sometime a tricky job trying to juggle resources to ensure that our customers receive the highest level of service while also making sure that the sales people are fully trained on all new products and technologies coming onto the market.

The next hour or so until lunchtime is spent returning phone calls and making my usual daily contact with my top accounts, sorting out any issues they may have and arranging account management meetings with them. Lunchtime arrives and I grab a quick sandwich. By 1.30pm I’m out on the road to visit a prospect who was recommended to us via one of our technology partners. Working in a small company means you have to use whatever external resources are available to you in order to satisfy your customers’ requirements. It would be impossible for us to retain high level engineering services in all areas of technology so instead we concentrate on provision of professional services in certain key areas, and partner with specialist companies who provide us with resources in other areas.

This particular prospect received a recommendation about us through a Web development company we partner with in some of our key accounts. The new client is looking for a complete technology refresh and advice on implementing stricter security
procedures for both office-based and remote users accessing the Internet. I spend a couple of hours giving a presentation and explaining in detail my recommendations. It’s very important to gain a customer’s trust at the first meeting; if they don’t feel confident in your ability to deliver a solution, it can make it a very tough sale.

Today my sales pitch is successful and I have the order, so it’s back into the Dublin traffic which, being August, is thankfully much less stressful than normal, and head back to prepare for the next day’s round of fun in the reseller world!

Loman McCaffrey is public sector account manager for IT consultancy Unitech Systems.

I live in Newbridge, Co Kildare, and if I leave the house at 6.45am, I’m usually at my desk in Sandyford by 8.00am. As anyone who commutes to work in Sandyford knows, if you leave it any later to come in, you lose an hour at the start of your day.

The first thing I do when I get to the desk is to draw up a to-do list to cover off the entire day. Once the day begins, it can be hard to keep track of the different tasks in front of you, so it’s important to have your day mapped out as much as possible. Once that’s done, I usually try to take 30 minutes to review the latest business and technology publications, both print and online just so I can remain up to date on any developments in my area.

Then it’s into the day. A daily, early morning task is to review the e-tenders Web site to check if there’s any new projects that have been out to tender. We’re heading into a busy period in the government space as a lot of projects have allocated budgets that need to be spent by the end of the year, and many of these would have two or three-month lead times.

It’s usually easier to catch people in the morning, so I try to get most of the day’s calls out of the way by 11.00am. These can range from liaising with technical people who are on site with a client, to talking to customers who are in the opening stages of implementing solutions, to chasing distributors who are getting stuff to a client.

At present, the middle part of the day tends to be taken up with a lot of meetings and presentations with potential customers. Again, this is a result of us heading into a busy time of the year. For example, I recently had a three-hour presentation with a potential customer on the back of a government tender, which involved going through the proposed solution in considerable detail.

The next stage in a process like this usually involves a site visit, where the prospect will visit a customer that we’ve already worked with to get an independent view of the work that we do. Usually, we organise this and then stand back, as the prospect will feel a lot
easier about asking questions if we’re not staring over theirshoulder.

The biggest challenge in dealing with the public sector is that there is no opportunity to trade off the loyalty of the customer. Basically, every public sector customer is required to make a decision on a deal based on the merits of that deal itself, without taking into
account any previous working relationships. This means that it’s important that every element of your proposal is bang on the mark, from the specific products and applications to the details of your reference sites.

This is different from the situation with some private sector customers where, if the relationship is good and you’ve done good work for them in the past, you can be pretty sure that you’ll get the job. Another big challenge is to remain up to speed on all the new technologies that come on to the market. In our case, it’s obviously important that we’re completely clued up on IBM’s latest offerings. We do courses to get qualified in certain areas—like the IBM pSeries range—but a lot of our knowledge comes from just talking to people in the industry, be it IBM, business partners or whoever.

When the day’s done, I usually try and switch off as much as possible. The pace of life in Unitech and in the sector generally means that downtime is important. In terms of relaxing, I’m on the downward slope of my football career, but am beginning to make inroads into playing golf. However, as we’ve recently moved into our new home, a lot of my time is spent on learning about DIY and how to do up the place.

Raymond McGrath is the IT sales manager for distributor Osmosis.

It’s 7 am. The alarm clock gets thrown against the wall again. At 7:10 am the final alarm woke me. It is always recommended to glue at least one alarm down! In the office in Swords by 8.30, traffic was light! No queue for the coffee machine. It’s 8.45 and everyone is rustled up for our morning meeting. This can go on for up to an hour, but it gets all the grievances and indeed the praises out of the way ready for the day.

We talk about the market and how customers are are reacting to the wonderful ups and downs of the IT industry. Each month we take on a new product to promote. This month it is BenQ. We break down and analyse our market penetration of the promotion. With
every new promotion there has to be an incentive. There is a trip for two to New York up for grabs so everyone is that little bit more hungry to get out of the meeting and start selling.

As the dust settles from the meeting, targets are handed out and everyone is on the phones. Osmosis Ireland is very much a proactive distribution company and with eight sales people we usually have two on the road on any one day. We have no specificfield sales people, as each sales person has the freedom to visit customers when they wish. Sometimes it is hard to get out of the office. Today I don’t have the time to escape as Samsung are in to discuss the promotion they ran with us the month before. Thankfully we’ve reached our target of notebook sales, so all is good. This is the thing about a fast moving distribution company, we always need training on new products, and as the company grows our portfolio of products grow. It is constantly refined and tuned to keep
up with market movements.

After lunch it’s back on the phones again. I try and use the hour after lunch to do some cold calling. Although Osmosis Ireland is a well established firm trading since 1999 we, like all the other distributors, have to keep growing our customer database. I think Irish customers still love Human Interaction. I was talking to a customer of mine and she said that on any day she would receive in excess of 100 e-mails. Granted, about five to 10 of them were about ‘natural Viagra’ and how size really matters (so they say!), but a lot
were from IT companies, so much so that she is now immune to e-mail spam. I actually have to give her a call to tell her I am sending a mail.

By 4pm, it is all hands on deck to get all the orders out by 5pm. This is the busiest hour of the day and is usually organised chaos. Because of margins being constantly pushed down in IT, it is more important then ever to offer a complete portfolio of products and
therefore be a one-stop shop.

After 5pm the day is winding down. At this time it is all about getting the quotes out that build up over the past couple of hours. Then it’s off to the pub!

Ray O’Connor is country sales manager for 3Com Ireland

It’s 7am, Monday morning and the usual little knock comes on the door. I try to pretend it’s a dream at first but as the knock will turn into a thud and eventually a scream, I decide to let our two-year-old Leah burst into our bedroom all bright ‘n breezy. ‘Time to get up Daddy, Mammy’. For a number of months now we have no longer required an alarm clock and this is by far a more pleasant way to start the day!

This is a typical Irish summer’s morning, with rain thrashing against the bedroom window as I try to remember where exactly I’m supposed to be today. A quick shower awakens the senses—of course it’s the 8am Monday management conference call with
the UK management team. We invested in a ‘Shomera’ some time back, so we could have an office at home that is external to the house and it has proved very useful, especially for those 8am conference calls. The call lasts until 10 am. The mood amongst the team is very positive as business has been healthy, although we have experienced the usual softness in the market over June and July.

I have a meeting at 12 in the city with a financial institution, so I have about an hour to do some work online, prepare for the meeting and travel in. It’s a strong prospect so my pre-sales manager Stefan Callery and the relevant reseller will also attend the meeting. I have worked with Stefan for three years and we make a very good team; he has very strong technical skills that complement my sales and account-management experience.

I’m over 12 years now in IT sales roles, including four in 3Com and the previous five in IBM. US IT firms tend to have a ‘death by training policy’ so I think I have attended just about every communication and motivational course known to man, although my wife Eavan tells me all those skills become null and void as soon as I arrive home; my response is that I’m inflicted by nature’s design – I am male after all!!

Preparation for these meetings is essential, so I always have a list of objectives to reach, if not at this meeting but over the course of the bid. There’s nothing worse than a pushy salesperson; my style tends to be friendly and easygoing but always very focused. Does
every meeting go according to plan? Of course not, but it’s critical to analyse your performance and try to work on the areas you could improve upon or indeed the ones you have let slip over the years! Anyone in sales will tell you the final barometer is what business you win, but a lot of issues can get overlooked in the process. The old saying: ‘you learn a lot more from the deals you lose than the ones you win’, is very true. The meeting goes very well and they are looking at a major LAN upgrade but it will be a highly competitive bid. Been there, done that! I am confident of winning the new project.

In four years at 3Com I have dealt with just about every objection possible, and have learnt (the hard way in some cases) to ‘cover all the bases’. My time is divided between managing our top resellers, engaging end users and managing the general business, ie people, marketing, PR, finance, business management etc. By far the most enjoyable and challenging aspect is working with our resellers on major prospects directly. I worked in the UK for a number of years in the early part of my career and, despite the ‘Celtic Tiger’, it’s still a far more sociable and less clinical business in Ireland and I hope that will never change. The three of us grab a quick lunch in the city centre, and I’m back in my Shomera for about 3.30.

The next three hours or so will be spent answering phone messages and e-mails. I log on to the usual bombardment of mails, 90 per cent of which are generally trash—I’ve become pretty clinical at deleting or filing the ‘less important’ mails. The journey home takes about 10 seconds (across the garden), this one’s a little more intrepid than normal as it’s still raining! Now the real work begins, how to entertain our two year old and five month old for the next couple of hours.

Catherine O’Neill is a sales executive with Fujitsu Services Ireland, looking after the finance, government and pharmaceutical sectors

It’s 9.00am and time for a sales meeting that is chaired by our country operating officer, John Clare. This is a fortnightly meeting for the sales team to discuss the pipeline and activity in the marketplace.

This morning we had an upbeat meeting owing to the solid results we have had so far this year, and partly due to the good weather! The focus of the meeting this morning was an update and analysis of the year-to-date sales figures (all good news, so far so good); a
forecast for Q3 and Q4 (again looking quite good, with some interesting opportunities in the funnel); and an update on the market place and competitors, which is knowledge and information from the field shared amongst the sales team. This is a great opportunity for getting a wider view of our marketplace…..and the odd yarn.

The second meeting of the day, at 10.00am, is the Opportunity Review meeting. Each sales person is armed with the certainty that their own opportunities are the ‘hottest’. This weekly forum is held to ensure that valuable resources are assigned appropriately. I
requested a pre-sales technical person to assist me with customer meetings regarding our Digital Media Networks offering, which is a multimedia delivery and management service mainly for plasma screens in-store that are used for advertising.

An hour later, we have a third meeting for reviews of bid qualifications. I have identified an opportunity with one of my existing finance customers for a nationwide server and desktop management and maintenance service. In order to get the bid team assigned to prepare this proposal I presented the opportunity to my senior management and talked about the customer profile, the business opportunity, the team required for a bid of this
size, and the potential risks during the preparation of the bid that may prevent us from submitting a high quality proposal.

I am very happy with the outcome of this meeting; I have the required approval for my bid budget and excellent bid team assigned. So I agreed to complete the proposal in five weeks not the six weeks that I originally sought.

At 11.30am, a meeting with the Digital Media Networks Framework Steering Group in which we discussed a pilot rollout of Retail TV, which we are implementing in a well known Irish retail chain.
12.30pm. Final rehearsal of a client presentation for this afternoon. In this meeting we ran through the key messages and themes of our presentation, including running through of each part of the presentation, and checked all slides and timings. Then, time for a banana, apple and a cup of tea!

At 2pm I depart the office for customer site. No traffic, arrive early!! Could have had lunch after all……
The presentation to the customer commences at 2.30pm. Following the recent merger of Fujitsu Services and Fujitsu Consulting, we presented to a long-standing central government customer to demonstrate how our strategic partnership with them is enhanced by our now extended capabilities. At the end of the meeting, the customer requests a site visit to our data centre and Network Operations Centre in Swords to view our managed services in action. I have set a date for two weeks hence. I am extremely pleased with how the presentation went this afternoon.

At 4.30pm I get the chance to catch up on phone messages and responded where possible from the car. I also found the traffic that was missing earlier! Later that evening I logged on to respond to customer e-mails, followed up on actions from the customer meeting and circulated minutes. I then started to organise the site visit requested by our customer earlier today.

Bob Sinnot is a partner account manager with HP Ireland’s Solutions Partner Organisation and works with a number of the company’s larger resellers.

An early morning start with a breakfast meeting at 7.30 in the Great Southern at Dublin Airport. The meeting is with the sales director of one of our resellers (who is travelling to UK today) to give me a heads up on some changes they are planning in the organisation
and the makeup of their sales team. I take the opportunity to review where they are likely to finish with Q3 versus target, and to discuss the outlook for Q4.

At 9pm I travel to another reseller for one of my weekly on-site meetings. Every week I visit each of the resellers on a particular day – that way we ensure that we cover a set agenda at least once a week. On the way, I pick up a load of new voice-mails and respond to some that were left over from yesterday.

I hold separate meetings with main players on the reseller management team, including the MD, sales director, finance manager, and marketing manager. We cover the normal
topics with each, including performance for current quarter (just finished), goals and prospects for next quarter, the status of their top 10 opportunities and other issues and concerns. We review some planned new sales initiatives and agree in principle to carry
out some joint planning sessions in support of these initiatives during the next quarter.

Wireless and mobile technologies are a bit of a hot topic at the moment and many resellers are trying to find an angle in the business that they can take with these technologies. The question for me is what can I provide in terms of a solution they can
bring to market?

Linux is another area that resellers are interested in and are keen to know how they can position themselves to take advantage of its increasing profile. Certified training in Linux is currently a very strong area of interest.

In the meeting with the marketing manager, we discuss some upcoming events where they are seeking our support and review their outline marketing plan for the next six months. I attempt to relate their activities to areas of particular focus for us and agree to review their marketing events schedule against our own plans to minimise overlap.

There is funding available from HP to help its resellers bring products to their markets but of course their marketing strategies must complement our own and be consistent with the areas on which we are focusing ourselves. There’s less and less discretionary market
spend on these things, so budgets must be used wisely.

Logged on briefly from my hotdesk and picked up my mails (35 new mails waiting). Nothing looks especially urgent, and as I don’t have enough time to do anything meaningful with them yet, I decide to leave them until the afternoon. The usual trickle of sales guys passing my hotdesk. I find this very useful for keeping in
touch with what’s happening at the coalface. It also gives me an opportunity to get early visibility of some of the prospects they are working on.

Lunch at a local hostelry at 12.30 with some of the sales team. An hour later I’m on the road to Leixlip … phone has been hopping all morning and so I pick up voice-mails on the way and try to respond to as many as possible. Back at the office in Leixlip at 2pm, I spend the first hour to hour and a half responding to voice-mails and e-mails. There are three bid support requests in my mails and I process them.<br/>
Completed some mandatory online training on Grey Market Compliance Trading, which takes 45 minutes. Nowadays there is increased focus on training, especially in areas like compliance, end-user verification and standards of personal conduct. The grey market issue is an area of huge concern for us. Grey market products find their way onto the local marketplace and cause disruption to authorised sellers. The training is particularly important as it teaches staff to recognise grey products and how to avoid
contributing to the problem.

Finance are looking for the monthly reseller salesout reports again…. the cut off date for inclusion in next payroll is tomorrow so there is pressure on to get them in. Spend some time phoning round my resellers to remind them to send them in. A problem has emerged involving a shipment to one of my resellers of a large number of faulty disks for one of our customers. The fault is the subject of an engineering advisory and I spend time researching the recommended solution, and discussing with the reseller on how best to implement it.

At 6pm I drive home. Use the time to make a few phone calls – it’s amazing how much catching up and keeping in touch you can do in this way. Finally, as reception on the M50 gets bad, I stop calling!

Donal Yorke is a sales executive with responsibility for selling Iquate’s asset management software into North America.

One of the great things about selling into North America is that I start work about midday. My hours match that of my customer base – I tend to work between midday and about 8 or 9pm. This enables me to speak with clients and prospects on both the East and the West coasts of America. Obviously, most of my work is telephone and e-mail based.

I usually start off my day by discussing the previous day’s activities with my manager (he’s having his lunch and I have my breakfast!). We focus on the sales pipeline and identifying the main prospects.
iQuate markets its products primarily through online activities (including search engine marketing, Google Adwords, Overture, online PR and sector specific newsletters). Our prospects download trial versions of our products, so, by the time I call them, they already know about iQuate. It is most likely that they have also experienced our software.

Therefore my initial telephone call is not completely ‘cold’. We try to ensure that all new prospects are called within 3 hours of registering their interest. I often call prospects as they are going through their initial trial – their reaction is normally amazement that a software vendor would not only take the time to call but that we are calling within a few hours of them downloading our products for the first time.

For each call, I gather four pieces of information that will help me close the sale. These are (a) their business and specific IT Asset Management requirements, (b) their budget availability, (c) the timeline for purchasing, and, finally, (d) the signoff/purchasing
process.  This confirms (or otherwise) that they are in the market for and have budget for our products. Once we have this information, my job is to ensure that they understand the benefits that our products offer over the competition.

As we are the developers, I can always get the answers to any and all questions from within the company. I used to work in the channel and I regularly had to call vendors for answers to customer queries. This introduced delays – now I can simply transfer the call to the support department or even escalate issues directly to the developers of our products.

Once I have completed making calls to new prospects, I move onto managing existing and potential business. This includes following up on purchase order status, replying to specific technical queries and other day-to-day sales issues. To manage our prospects and customers, I use a CRM system developed in-house by
iQuate. This system includes a tracking module for the online registrations and downloads of our software, a contact management module, a lead tracking module, a quotation management module and our customer support system. This gives me (and everyone else in iQuate) access to all customer interactions, pre and post sale, in one place.

Before making a call, I check the system for an up-to-the-minute status relating to the client or prospect. One of the best things that I find about using this system is that its built-in knowledge base allows me to find answers quickly to technical questions, which
may not have been asked previously. This CRM system is mission critical to the company and we all use it throughout the day.
Because I am selling products in the US, I have to always be aware of the cultural differences between Europe and North America. I have noticed that I have changed my terminology in work. Recently, I was speaking to a prospect in Kentucky about a wedding I was going to over the weekend. The following Monday we were chit-chatting and he asked me how I enjoyed the wedding. When I told him there had been great ‘craic’ at the wedding there was an awkward silence for about 30 seconds. I quickly realised what he was thinking and it took me about five minutes to explain what ‘the
craic’ meant. We both had a laugh about it and I managed to close the sale.

My friends think I have a great job—I get to sleep in every morning and still be in the pub by 9.00pm. They also find my ‘trans-Atlantic’ accent amusing; it takes about an hour for me to get back to my normal accent after eight hours on the phone to the States.
Have a nice day, y’all.

18/10/04

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