Sales to Marketing in 3 easy steps! 🙄
In late 2000, PC World Business (PCWB, owned at the time by Dixons Stores Group International PLC, DSGi) had just completed building a purpose-built office and warehouse for PCWB HQ in Bury after recently acquiring a local reseller, DNCS. A motley crew of late teenagers and 20-somethings, some of whom would later become major players in the IT Channel!
Originally established in the late 1970s as a computer consumables company based in Heywood, Greater Manchester, DNCS operated for over 20 years before it was acquired in 1996. This acquisition served as the foundation for PC World Business.
But I didn’t get to experience the wild days of DNCS.
I was working technical support for one of the UK’s biggest consumer PC brands, TIME Computers, which had seen one too many visits to the BBC's Watchdog with Anne Robinson and had started to wind things down.
PCWB were on a massive recruitment drive to fill their new office; it was close to home, and I managed to get an interview.
...Last part of the interview.
Des Sumner - “What team do you want to work on?”
Me – “What teams are there?"
Des – “Key accounts, North, South, LAN Team…”
Me – “LAN Team, what do they do”
Des - “They do all the techie server stuff for sales, quoting, etc”
Me – “Where do I sign!?”
I’d just spent 5 years either installing/supporting PCs and servers or helping some poor sod who got sold the TIME Computers dream, and was trying to set up every USB device on Windows Millennium (IYKYK).
Being 20, I gave a lot less thought to my next steps. I took the job, loved it, met many people I still know today, and learned about technology and infrastructure that I’d go on to use throughout my career.
Eight years later, PCWB had become Equanet, I’d become a salesperson, and we'd just hit a global recession. In 2008, I was made redundant. I stuck to what I knew and continued working in sales roles.
DREAM JOB
I’d been selling QNAP products for two years before joining as their second UK employee in 2013; I even had one of their products running my Logitech MP3 server. Getting a job at QNAP meant more than just another vendor role.
I’d never been an external salesperson and, the reality is, I probably wasn’t best suited to it either. But I did okay. The role involved more than just sales, and QNAP gave me the freedom to do things that would have involved a whole bunch of bureaucracy at other vendors.
THE MIDDLE BIT
Averaged 30,000 miles a year.
Got a promotion.
Hired a team.
Opened a UK office.
COVID.
Had a stroke.
Decided to slow down.
THE END (Of IT sales)
When I was made redundant at QNAP in late 2024, I’d just completed 11 years, a third of my career in one place. I had no plans to go back into a senior position, and the IT industry had changed significantly since I last looked for a role.
A lot can happen in 2 years...
At first, though, I did what I’d always done: I looked for another role in the IT industry. I joined Exertis, then NCS IT. There were good people and things I enjoyed about both jobs, but they didn't work out.
I had started attending networking events after QNAP, something really out of my comfort zone but felt it was important. Through these, I met and eventually worked with a health and wellbeing coach, and more recently a specialist recruiter who helps people (like me) get some direction.
Those conversations made me look at what I’d actually enjoyed doing over the years. The sales side had given me a career, but some of the work I kept coming back to was the marketing: coming up with ideas, creating content and building the QNAP YouTube channel. I’d spent a long time assuming my next job had to be another version of the last one.
GrumpyKitten Marketing
So, at 46, I’m back at college studying digital marketing, alongside some additional online courses. I’m also helping a couple of local businesses with their marketing to get more hands-on experience.
GrumpyKitten is where I’m putting all of that together. It’s still early days, and I’m not going to pretend I’ve got it all figured out. But after 30 years of working in and around sales, it feels good to be learning something new and finding out where it could take me.
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