Sales and Customer Service Power Up

We’ve had some team changes and made a couple of improvements to how we do ‘account management’ and how we get the message out about all our great products:

‘Account management’ has found its natural home among the customer service team.
We’ve finally taken on a full-time dedicated sales person!

Account Management

In most companies, ‘Account Manager’ is a pseudonym for a sales person. In SARD, it has always literally meant the manager of the account – somebody who takes our clients under their wing and makes sure they get the best from our products. Historically our account managers have been travelling up and down the country, meeting our clients at the hospitals and listening to feedback on system changes. COVID put a stop on the physical, in-person meetings and we’ve spent the last 18 months working out just what the ‘Account Manager’ role looks like in this new terrain. What we started to realise is that account management looked a lot like ‘customer service.’ Many of our administrators, medical and HR directors, etc. are just very important and specific types of customer and their requests were landing in Megan’s lap anyway. So, instead of ‘Account Managers’ relaying client requests from the corners of the country like some medieval messenger, why not just boost Megan’s Customer Service team? They’re the experts on the products. So, we’ve boosted Megan’s team with a new hire, Tom, who will be joining us next month. Megan has been promoted to Customer Service Director with a new portfolio for managing accounts i.e. liaising with senior management to understand how they can get the best out of our systems. And as circumstances allow, we’ll be back to do some in-person meetings too; partly just because we enjoy the biscuits.

The downside to this is that we had to say goodbye to our eternally affable and likeable Account Manager, Pete, who was ready, willing and able to jump into that travelling Account Manager role just as soon as things opened up again. But the world has changed and video meetings will be dominating for a while yet. Our loss is the NHS’s gain though, as we understand he’s now joining the NHS as an IT manager. Congratulations on the new role and thanks for being so understanding about the new structure.

A dedicated Sales Manager

First off – don’t worry – you’re not about to be pursued by a slimy Sales Manager thirsty to hit their targets. Chris is a great guy and we selected him because he’s very much from the consultative mould. His job is to make sure existing and future clients know what we have to offer so that they get the best system on the market.

So, why now?

There are two flavours of companies in the health tech industry:

Sales-centric companies that trade on promises and then desperately scramble to farm out the technical delivery and;
Tech-centric companies that trade on reputation and then rely on word of mouth for sales generation.

A company will show you which flavour it is: just look for where they spend their money. SARD’s wage bill is approximately 80% technologists and customer support. We’ve always been and will continue to be, within the tech-centric model.

But a recent event made us realise that we owe it to our team, and you the customers, to be bolder with our sales process. A client of ours - a large teaching hospital - procured and installed a rostering system at eye-watering expense. A few months later they were frustrated to find that SARD has a far better value eRostering product that they simply didn’t know about. They were kicking themselves!

And so, we decided that Jan, our Business Development Lead Generator, and Phil, our Sales Director, could do with another pair of hands to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Chris’ job is to ensure that the products our expert engineers create get the exposure they deserve and that our clients, once Jan has made those all important introductions, get assistance in procuring the best products on the market. No more burying SARD’s light under a bushel. We’ve got great products and we want to make sure hospitals know about them!

It’s taken us 10 years, and word of mouth reputation has got us a long way, but it’s nice to finally have a full-time sales person. Welcome to the SARD family, Chris!

And one of our Hotel California goodbyes

There’s a running joke that “SARD is definitely not a CULT” and you can never fully leave SARD. And it’s with this sentiment that we say a goodbye to our Software Developer Jordan, who first joined us on a 10-week work placement from the University of Kent School of Computing. Now that Jordan has graduated Uni and offered a great Lead Developer role on campus, we have had to say goodbye. Luckily Jordan won’t be far. Former SARDinians have a habit of reappearing and so we’re hoping he’ll still pop his head in to say ‘hi’ from time to time.