I arrive at work just before nine after dropping the kids at school and head to the office I share with Julie and Barbara from the New Product Development (NPD) team. As the National Account Manager, I am the only member of the sales team that is based at our Berwick-upon-Tweed head office full-time, so it is good to share a space with others.
Mondays always start the same, pulling together the previous week's sales data and breaking it down by customer. Analysing the data allows us to look for changes and trends that we are seeing in customer orders. Doing this allows us to follow up with customers to make sure that their needs are met and help deliver the service that they expect from Silvery Tweed. I will share this with David and Chris, the other members of the sales team so that they have an overview of what happened the previous week.
After pulling the report together, I check my emails and the enquiry email address to see what has come in overnight. I will pick up anything that is urgent and from there make a list of jobs that have come from those emails.
That sees me through to about 10am when I will grab a cup of tea and plan for the rest of the day.
My first task is to let NPD know about any sample requests. If these are relatively small, then they will send them out. For larger samples of the size that companies may want to use in a test bake, I will pass these to Ruth in sales orders so she can arrange for them to be put on a pallet and sent out.
The Directors have a board meeting coming up, so I will pull together all the sales data into a report for them to review in the meeting before turning my attention to the customer accounts that I look after. There is pricing to be done and emailed out as well as sending David and Chris information that they need for customer visits they have booked this week.
We have regular sales meetings, which I will take the minutes of and then transfer anything relevant onto a rolling document so that the sales team can see the latest information on each customer.
I am also part of the NPD innovations meetings, where we focus on new ideas and areas that we can look to work in.
I switch the computer off, wash my cup, and finish work at 3pm, when I head to pick my kids up from school.