Meet the author – Paul North


Meet the author – Paul North

Our new Sales Manager, Paul North, is our next author to meet. Despite being relatively new to his current role and our Opinion blog, he is an Entanet veteran with over 10 years service across our technical support, provisioning and sales teams.

13 June 2017

[caption id="attachment_135" align="alignleft" width="128"]Paul North Paul North, Sales Manager[/caption] Our new Sales Manager, Paul North, is our next author to meet. Despite being relatively new to his current role and our Opinion blog, he is an Entanet veteran with over 10 years service across our technical support, provisioning and sales teams. How long have you worked at Entanet? I started at Entanet as a technical support agent in 2006 aged just 18. After a year or so in support I was seconded to Ethernet provisioning for a while before joining the sales team in October 2007. I became a solutions consultant in March 2010 and then Sales manager in July 2016, so I’ve gained a lot of industry (and company) knowledge and experience over the last 10 years. What are your key responsibilities within the business and what are your areas of expertise? I am currently responsible for our entire Ethernet and Wholesale DSL number. I manage our team of Sales Consultants and I assist them with customer meetings, conference calls and individual deals. I create promotions & strategies for the team and I also manage the commercial relationships with our key suppliers such as BT Wholesale, TalkTalk, Virgin & Vodafone. My main product areas of expertise are layer 2 xDSL, Ethernet & MPLS. With regards to opinion, which topics do you usually cover and why? As you’d expect, as Sales Manager I tend to focus on the more sales focused articles and usually discuss the market opportunities around a certain product or issue. For example, I’m currently publishing a series of articles discussing the 5 signs you need a specific service such as a leased line, VoIP or PWAN. So far we have published just 2 of these articles so keep a look out for the rest. Related articles: Do you have any specific industry areas of interest that you would like to discuss on opinion or that you particularly follow? I love technological innovation and I’m always keen to see which new products, services and technologies the industry is delivering next and how they will impact on people’s day to day life. Currently, I’m really interested in the rise of M2M and its various uses. In some of your latest articles for Opinion you use a slideshare to demonstrate the 5 signs you need a specific service. Do you think using alternative media helps resellers digest your message better? Yes. We’re all busy people and don’t always have the time to read a detailed article or eBook, however useful they may be. Therefore I prefer to keep my articles short and snappy and use more visual aids such as slideshares, infographics, stats etc to help get the key points of the message across quickly and easily. I hope our readers agree this is useful. We actively encourage feedback and interaction from our readers, what would you like to hear about from them? I’d like to hear about their own experiences and hopefully answer any questions they may have about reselling our products and services. For example, are you struggling to enter the PWAN/IP VPN market and need sales and technical help? Are you struggling to differentiate yourself against other VoIP resellers? How are you coping with ever decreasing margins for broadband? Let me know about any issues you are having or any help you need and myself and my team will see how and where we can help. Just leave me a comment on here or email sales@enta.net. Getting to know Paul What are your interests/hobbies outside of the office? I have quite an eclectic mix of hobbies but my main one is creating, mixing and listening to underground Electronic dance music, luckily my wife also loves the music so I can make a racket at home on a regular basis! In addition to the above, I'm a keen hiker and a very proud owner of a 2 year old Springer Spaniel called Jaxx so we spend a lot of time over in the Welsh mountains of a weekend conquering our next peak. I'm also a huge foodie and luckily Shropshire has a lot of fantastic places to eat so my wife and I are often out enjoying some good nosh in a pub or restaurant. The perfect combination is when we end a hike in a dog friendly pub that serves great food. Finally, I'm a big film & TV buff so I like to visit the cinema once a month and get stuck into a good Netflix TV series when I have a free evening. If you could have a superpower what would it be and why? I would love the ability to control space and time so I could go back and experience some of the greatest moments of the past and get a glimpse of the future. I ticked off a life goal last year when I spent 5 nights in Rome and all I could think when I was there was "I would love to have seen all of this at the peak of it's glory". The other added bonus of this power is that I could stop time and cram in more time for my hobbies. Who would you like to meet dead or alive and why? JRR Tolkien. The Hobbit was the first fantasy book I read and it made me fall in love with the genre, I would love to ask him more about his inspiration and the stories. What are your three favourite things in life? Electronic dance music, dogs (especially my own) and food What is your pet hate? People blindly sharing things on social media without researching the truth behind it first. [subscribe2]