Crosstalk with Select Telecom (Spring 2013)
Every issue, “Get to Know Select” will feature a different employee sharing their experience at Select Telecom, along with updates about what’s going on at the company. Have a favorite employee you’d like to hear from? Email us to let us know!
Major Account Manager Joe Clarkin has been an integral part of Select Telecom’s sales and customer consulting team since the fall of 2004. If you’ve recently purchased a new system or inquired about options to save money on your communications system while increasing performance, there’s a good chance that Joe might have been the Select Telecom team member who assisted in your recommendation.
For Joe, that’s the best of his day – helping customers to find solutions to their most pressing communications problems. “As I always say, people buy from people, not from companies. Our customers know they can trust us to do right by them by providing superior service and the best products on the market.”
In fact, Joe has been in the business of building customer relationships since the very beginning of his career. Prior to joining Select Telecom, he sold office copier machines for Connecticut Business Systems and then transitioned into selling dial tones and local/long-distance/internet service at Conversant Communications. When Joe met Select Telecom President Mike Durante, he saw an opportunity to expand his knowledge of telecom products beyond services and into hardware, which would allow him to provide end-to-end solutions for customers. “Mike had a great reputation in the business community,” Joe recalls, “and I’d done a couple deals with him, so I didn’t hesitate to jump at this chance. A lot of salespeople know the dial tones or the hardware, but very few understand both. I saw that I could be a lot more valuable to customers in this role.”
After all, dedication is a quality that Joe is known for, both in his professional and personal lives. He’s a devoted father of three boys – ages 5, 10, and 12 – and he’s currently coaching all three of them in baseball. “That’s all I care about – my kids and my wife,” he says with pride. And he’s been participating in a Fantasy Football league for 22 years straight – that’s right, before the advent of the internet! “When we first started, the league commissioner would check the box scores from the Tuesday edition of USA Today and type out each week’s final stats to tally who won or lost. Then he’d make copies of the results and mail them – stamp and all – to everyone in the league. Sometimes we wouldn’t even get our results until we were already playing the following week’s games.” Talk about snail mail! “The internet changed everything, thankfully,” he laughs.