World Economic Forum’s 2016 research The Future of Jobs found out that emerging job category of specialized sales representatives is expected to become critically important by the year 2020.
“.. as practically every industry will need to become skilled in commercializing and explaining their offerings to business or government clients and consumers, whether due to the innovative technical nature of the products themselves, due to their being targeted at new client types with which the company is not yet familiar, or both."
As an example in IT industry automation and cloud services are cutting down the need for manual system administration. At the same time big share of large development projects and R&D can be outsourced to low cost countries. What is left for western IT workforce is agile co-creation, identifying and solving customers’ business issues in close collaboration with the customer.
This requires sales skills. Technical specialists are not traditionally trained in sales skills, while traditional communications training is missing commercial side, how technical features are turned into customer benefit and communicated in a way that makes the sale.
Sales Fundamentals for Technical Specialists explains how technical specialists can provide value in the modern sales process and in general how to learn the basic sales and influencing skills. These skills are crucial whether you are selling yourself or your ideas in inside your own organization or to the customer.
The book includes interviews from the world leading sales engineer trainer John Care, top 100 social selling influencer Sani Leino, leadership communications expert, TED/TEDx speaker trainer John Bates, presentation consultant and coach Timo Sorri and negotiation trainer Taina Närhi.
Janne V. Korhonen has been working in technical sales roles within multiple organisation in IT industry for over last 10 years. He has found Sales Engineering Finland, world’s first and largest meetup group focusing on technical sales and marketing. In Sales Fundamentals for Technical Specialists he has been able to summarise sales fundamental in a easily consumable way for technical specialists.
"I recommend this book for everyone who works in sales." - Joonas Korgan, Account Manager, Vaadin
"I just finished reading this book and it is excellent. In addition to mastering technical skills, every technical specialist would benefit from understanding how to sell. I highly recommend reading it." - Ilkka Tengvall, Solutions Architect, Red Hat
"I read this as an e-book and found it incredibly helpful—it made me think. I plan on rereading it again in paperback." - Jani Karhunen, Owner, Orchid Bits
