Account Manager Review

I am an account manager at Softcat. In terms of day to day activity, I manage accounts and customers around the north west in an account base that I have created through reaching out to IT Managers. Every day I talk to new contacts and existing customers in order to develop and further relationships with the aim of selling IT to make profit for myself and Softcat. I work in a lively and exciting environment, surrounded by fun people of all ages. I interact with colleagues of all tenure from account directors, up to sales managers and I have even had the pleasure of greeting our CEO when he visited our office. I am responsible for my customers and their needs of IT, as well as generating new opportunities by pitching new technologies. I work on many projects including networking, security, datacentre, cloud computing, managed print, hardware refreshes and much more.

My experience as a whole has been a huge learning curve, especially because I came straight form high school. We receive training once a month on IT and the technicalities, as well as sales training where I learn about new theories and styles. There is also training from vendors on specific technologies and training from internal members of Softcat on updates to a specific business area. All in all, I have learnt a great deal about IT sales as an industry and how to be successful in it.

I really do enjoy my programme, despite it being hard work. I think the guidance that we receive throughout really helps you to keep going as you always have support when things are difficult. Our company culture is one of a kind and makes me enthusiastic to attend work. This apprenticeship has exceeded my expectations of a workplace environment and has had a really positive impact on my attitude to education paths.

At Softcat we receive constant praise from managers and senior leadership. As well as there being weekly awards for good performance, when we reach our target the whole office applauds us (and that's 200 people) and we get praise from loads of different people. We also have awards at the end of each quarter for 'apprentice of the quarter'. Externally the apprenticeship scheme at Softcat has been recognised several times.

Our programme is very structured. We received 3 weeks of intensive induction at the beginning of our programme to give us knowledge to begin to reach out to customers. We now are given deadlines and dates for our coursework and end point interviews so that we have something to work towards. We know points of escalation for any issues and at which point we will have increases of targets and KPI's so that we can prepare our account base for this.

We have weekly conference calls with our training provider where we can ask any questions in regards to our coursework and previous sessions. We can utilise this time however we wish and reach out for more support, should we need it. We are always reminded that support is available, work related or not, and so I feel that this is definitely a strong point.

From my employer, I receive good support so that I can complete my day to day job. Colleagues and managers are always on hand to assist with any issues and answer questions. We also have loads of vendor managers which help us and comprehensive Q&A documents across business lines.

Compared to the minimum wage, our salary is very good however it doesn't leave much room for saving when travel expensive and food are taken out. It is also nice to socialise and enjoy the money that we have but I do find myself budgeting. I think that our commission plan could be a little more generous considering our level of hard work.

There are quarterly team nights out that we attend, as well as frequent company events and annual kick-off. There are also sports activities arranged by colleagues such as football, netball, cricket, hockey and much more. Weare also given access to discounted gym passes and other benefits such as private health consultations and discounted massages.

Yes

It's a great company to work at with a great culture. It is supportive and you are almost guaranteed to do well, if you put the graft in. I think people I know would really enjoy it here.

Work hard and come with a can-do attitude. Make sure that you are resilient and that you want to succeed. The interviews are very useful to get to know the company.