Print.IT Reseller - issue 83

01732 759725 18 WORKPLACE Paul North, Head of Regional Sales for CityFibre’s Wholesale team, picks the tools he uses every day and couldn’t do his job without I couldn’t do my job without... Trello uses a series of lanes with tickets, inside which you keep everything related to a certain task or project, that you can move along or switch into different lanes. It’s like a very sophisticated digital to-do list and just very cool. It’s really easy to keep everything in the right place and I find it much better and easier than relying on email – as someone once said, email is a place where information goes to die. 2 OneNote OneNote is how I record all my meetings. I have a set of key sections or meeting types, such as one-to-ones; customer meetings; my monthly sales meeting; human resources; sales strategy, and so on. Underneath that top layer I will have pages where I will keep all my notes, which I can add to as I have additional meetings. It’s very easy and it’s all free text. You can even add tags and voice notes. It’s much better than just taking notes and as it’s in the cloud, it’s all in one place and I can access it from anywhere. 3 SalesForce As a sales leader, I am obsessed with statistics and SalesForce gives me all the facts, figures and reporting that I need to get a really clear idea of where we are right now and what’s working for us. I find it really easy to spin-up a new dashboard for any of the regions – to see how many quotes have been done or what our conversion ratio is, for example. I can look at trends, analysis and stats on individual partners and customers. I can see what the pipeline looks like and see how busy our account managers are and identify any problems or weaknesses. I live and breathe by my dashboards on SalesForce. 4 Microsoft Teams I know it’s seen massive uptake during the pandemic, and I expect I am not the only one who would mention Teams, but it has been a revelation for me over the last few months. Previously, I only used it as an instant messaging tool, but we have really started to get into the system’s capabilities now. We can drop files into the system, populate them in advance and work on them together. Being able to open up a group chat with a group of colleagues and get things done quickly is really slick and simple. Microsoft added a ‘break-out rooms’ functionality and I really like that. I have already started using it in my sales team meetings. Teams is just a really simple and reliable nice collaborative tool that allows me to communicate with my team effectively. www.cityfibre.com 1 Trello This web-based list making and task management tool has transformed my working day. One thing I have always struggled with in my career has been organisation. My previous Sales Director used to say that I was hard working, enthusiastic and energetic, but not so great when it came to organising my day. With Trello, I feel really organised. It keeps all of my work visible. I can keep on top of my daily tasks and how well the various projects that my regional teams are working on are progressing. Paul North