Next in the Employee Highlight Hot seat is Tony Caesar.
Head of Sales
My role is to create, develop and implement the company’s sales plans.
This includes identifying products and services for both our existing and also new clients as well as identifying new markets and creating services for these.
New business is the main challenge – but the most rewarding.
Since February 2020 – so just 6 weeks before lockdown #1!
Not knowing a lockdown was imminent, I was fortunate to have managed to visit our major partners (as well as a number of clients) before the 23rd March!
The brief to take our company from an outstanding supplier with 100+ SMEs, to a niche provider for mid-sized/Enterprise clients in both the public and private sector.
That we were able to immediately move all our clients to remote working at no cost. The spike in calls to our help desk in late March was for advice and guidance – not faults or issues. All our clients have had the capability of remote working using Microsoft Azure, but hadn’t moved their entire workforce to remote working.
Going back nearly 10 years, Netmetix were pioneers with cloud technologies when we implemented our first Azure solution. This deep knowledge has meant that lockdown allowed us to develop some outstanding services to match with the digital acceleration that COVID demanded. During lockdown we became Government G Cloud accredited, we revamped our website, launched our ‘CAD in the Cloud’ solution, helped migrate a significant number of large enterprises into Azure through our partner network – and still continued to provide an outstanding service to our existing direct clients.
There’s quite a long list, but from a professional perspective, it’s the restriction on travel and meetings. For decades my working life has been face-to-face client meetings – often 4 days a week. I miss the train trips to London – honest!
New business is all about trust – it’s been challenging to create this via Teams – but it is possible if not ideal. Whilst we have attracted new clients over the last 6 months or so, much of the growth in our services has been through our partners – where that trust already existed and has been built on. Significant new business from new clients really benefit from those face to face meetings I think.
Integrity is advice that was drummed into me early in my sales career. If that is your guiding principal, you won’t go far wrong… oh, and when things go wrong (and they will), the measure is how you react and fix it.
To contact Tony for all things sales related drop him an email at tony.caesar@netmetix.net