About a month ago my friend Janne asked me to talk at the Sales Engineering Finland meetup.
I said yes because the topic of my presentation was interesting, and I wanted to see what Sales Engineering Finland is all about.
The website of Sales Engineering Finland states that:
Sales Engineering Finland is a network of engineers and subject matter experts in or interested in sales and marketing. Let’s grasp the opportunity of the paradigm shift in sales and marketing and lead the way in change of attitude towards selling in Finland.
Doesn't that sound interesting? My thoughts exactly!
Anyway, that meetup was held on 21st of April at Futurice , and this is my report from the event.
The Evening Started With Presentations
The meetup had three presentations:
- Laura Snelmann-Junna (Head of Marketing, Futurice) described how Futurice leverages engineers in their marketing efforts. I must admit that the term leverage might not be a bit negative because I got the impression that futupeople are marketers firsts and engineers second. Or maybe that sounded a bit fishy as well. Let’s just say that they care about their customers and colleagues. You can get the slides of her presentation from Slideshare.
- I identified four reasons why people think that they cannot write a technical blog and (hopefully) crushed those excuses. I was also prepared to describe the lessons that I learned when I wrote my first book, but I skipped that part because I ran out of time. Also, if you want to take a look at the slides of my presentation, you can get them from Slideshare.
- Marko Saarinen (Principal Industry Partner, Service Development, Digia) described the responsibilities of a digital marketing engineer and mentioned a few companies that have understood what digital marketing really means. I got the impression that is almost impossible to find people who can find meaningful patterns from the gathered data, present these patterns in a visually appealing way, and find good answers to the questions asked by the management. In other words, if you happen to have the required skills, this might be a very lucrative career path for your.
My Trip Back to Home Started Too Soon
Unfortunately I had leave right after the presentations were over because I had to catch the train back to Tampere.
This meant that I didn’t have a lot of time for networking, but I managed to meet Timo Sorri, who has a very interesting business idea. His company (Havain) designs impressive Keynote, Powerpoint, and Prezi presentations.
He wanted to do a complete makeover to my slide deck and write a blog post (in Finnish) about it. I agreed, and the new slide deck looks awesome.
Anyway, although I had to leave too early, I am happy that I traveled to Helsinki because the meetup was worth it. The other two presentations were interesting, and I had some interesting discussions. Also, I got something new to read and an awesome credit card holder.
If you are an engineer who is interested in marketing and networking, you should visit the next Sales Engineering Finland meetup. The atmosphere is really friendly and relaxed, and I promise that you will meet many interesting people. And who knows, maybe I will be one of them.