From waiting for demand to creating it

Starting in a reactive sales environment

My first role at AXI was as a sales assistant and engineer, combining technical support with a traditional commercial function. Much of the work was reactive: customers contacted us with a requirement, we identified the right product, checked pricing and availability with distributors such as Ingram Micro and Tech Data, added the appropriate margin, and returned a quotation. The process was straightforward, but it depended almost entirely on demand already arriving at the door.

When things were quieter, the instruction was very different. We were expected to take the Yellow Pages and start calling companies, without a script, a clearly defined segment, or much guidance on whom to approach and what to say. It was a very basic form of outbound selling, and in the beginning I was not particularly effective at it.

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Turning cold calling into a learning system

What changed was not the activity itself, but the way I started approaching it. Cold calling created an unusually fast feedback loop because every conversation produced some kind of response. Instead of judging myself on individual calls, I gradually began treating the process as a series of small experiments.

I tested whom I should ask for, whether that was the CEO, the IT manager, or somebody else. I changed the way I opened the conversation, compared different questions, and paid attention to what encouraged somebody to keep talking and what brought the conversation to an early end. The value came from repetition, because ten calls became a hundred and eventually hundreds more, creating enough evidence to recognise patterns and improve deliberately.

Over time, prospecting stopped feeling like an uncomfortable task and became something much more useful: a repeatable way of creating opportunities rather than simply waiting for them to appear.

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Building technical depth alongside commercial confidence

The same process was happening on the technical side of the role. Computers were already a personal interest, so whenever an unfamiliar product, a difficult technical question or an unusual customer request appeared, I wanted to understand it rather than simply find the fastest possible answer.

Vendor training led to certifications, while customer questions pushed me towards broader technical knowledge. Smaller requests gradually developed into more complex tenders and PC-at-Home projects, and I became increasingly comfortable dealing with vendors, distributors and customers across a wider range of topics. None of these developments represented a dramatic leap in isolation, but together they steadily expanded the work I was able to handle.

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When capability starts creating opportunity

That accumulation created its own momentum. The more I understood, the more useful I became to customers and colleagues, which in turn meant that more difficult assignments came my way. Each new responsibility created another reason to learn, while the knowledge gained from one problem often proved valuable when dealing with the next.

The role therefore started to change around the capabilities I was developing. I moved from responding mainly to incoming requests towards creating pipeline, handling more complex customer questions, contributing to larger tenders and building stronger relationships across customers, vendors and distributors. What had started as a relatively junior support role became a much broader commercial learning environment.

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The lesson that stayed with me

Looking back, this was one of the earliest experiences that shaped how I later thought about commercial teams and organisations. Performance is not determined only by the skills somebody possesses when they enter a role, because capability can develop surprisingly quickly when the surrounding conditions support it.

Curiosity encourages people to understand what sits behind a problem rather than merely resolve the immediate request. Self-motivation keeps that learning process moving without constant external pressure, while structure turns effort into something that can be improved rather than simply repeated. When frequent feedback and enough repetition are added to that combination, progress becomes much more predictable.

I was not consciously applying a sophisticated methodology at AXI. I was simply discovering through experience that being good at something and becoming good at something are very different things, and that commercial capability can be built deliberately when learning becomes part of the work itself.

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From waiting for work to creating it

By the time the role had evolved, the most important change was not that the job itself had suddenly become more interesting. The real change was that I had become more capable of recognising and creating opportunity within it.

That distinction stayed with me throughout the rest of my career. Whether the challenge involved developing people, building teams, improving sales processes or changing how commercial functions worked together, the underlying principle remained remarkably consistent: capability grows when people have enough curiosity to learn, enough structure to improve, and enough opportunities to put that learning into practice.