Hi and welcome to our course on the fundamentals of technology sales. My name is James Green. I'm the Managing Director of Learning and development within the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute, also known as Mtech here at the Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland. So kind of a long title, but to sum it up and focus on what I actually do, it's helping individuals be at startup entrepreneurs or corporate innovators be better at what they do. And so within Mtech, we offer a variety of courses and programs and degrees around entrepreneurship and innovation. And central to that is this course on sales. So why is sales so important and why is an engineering school teaching sales? Well, let's talk about technology sales specifically. So technology sales is incredibly important to any organization large or small. Sales, revenues is really the lifeblood of the company. You may have a great product, you may have a great service, but you need to sell it to generate the vital revenues for the company to thrive and survive. And so sales, something that's not actually taught in a lot of American universities is incredibly important. It's something that for many professional sales people, they learn on the job. There is somewhat of an apprenticeship, maybe there is some level of training in the organization or maybe not, maybe people are just expected to know it or to learn it on their own. And with that comes a lot of missteps, comes a lot of pitfalls, comes a lot of trial and error and that's what this course is designed to help you avoid. So in our course on technology sales, part of the central message is that sales jobs are always in demand. And particularly technology sales jobs are in very high demand today and for the foreseeable future. Why is that? because there's a lot of technology that's evolving. A lot of new technology that companies want and need. And the need to communicate to them and help solve their problem and sell that product or that service to them and so they need our help. And that's the aim that we have for our course. Now, to break it down and what you're going to learn in our course. The first thing we're going to do is explore some current technologies. So there are an abundance of opportunities in technology sales. There's artificial intelligence, there's Blockchain, there's internet of things and cloud and cyber, there's machine learning and data science and deep learning and big data. You may have heard of a lot of these terms. Fundamentally, you don't need to be an expert in everything to be good at technology sales but you need to know a little bit, you need to know enough. And so we're going to talk about a couple of these emerging technologies just as a sample within our course on cloud computing and cyber security. From there, we're going to get into some fundamentals of selling and what's involved in understanding how to consult, how to present and how to solve customers problems. So we're not selling products for products sake, we're not selling features, were selling solutions and in that way you need to know enough about the customer and what their needs and wants are. We're going to want to also develop some of your insight and skills and what's involved in selling to a private company, a small company, a large company, a public company and even a government, be it local or state or federal. And then lastly, the big piece of what we're going to do, in two of our four modules is about the four step methodology for success and technologies selling. And so you're going to learn about those four steps and begin to build some initial understanding of what's involved in each of those. Now, I'm not doing all the teaching. We are bringing in an expert team of some of the leading technology sales professionals in the country to collaborate with us on this offering. So you're going to hear from each of these, there are going to be a few lectures by each and we've included their biographies within the course as well. So you can learn a little bit about them too, and collectively we'll be collaborating to bring you our course. Now, who is this for? Well, it could be for somebody that's an aspiring technology sales professional, maybe you are newly graduating from college and are looking at careers in sales. Maybe you are well into your career, may be mid career, maybe senior career and you're looking to make a change. And you're looking to enter technology sales and both of those models were a great fit. We also can be of value to people that are actively selling now. So one element of being effective sales is continuous learning. And so this is an opportunity if you're already working in technology sales to kind of remind you of some things that you may have once learned or introduce some new things as well. This course can also be a great value to business owners and operators that need to sell what they currently have. And lastly and near and dear to my heart are the entrepreneurs of individuals that in addition to doing ideation and product development and design and marketing, you've gotta sell. You gotta sell to monetize your vision and so their skills here to that entrepreneurs can apply and learn. Also for our course, there's no pre existing knowledge that's required, there's no prerequisites. So anyone is welcome. We start from the ground up with our course. This is also an opportunity to earn a certificate. So within Coursera, should you choose to do the certificate track, you can earn that credential and that will be available in length and other places as well. Alternatively you could do the audit track, learn for free, that's fine as well. So with that welcome. We're excited to get started and we invite you to go ahead and click on the next link to get moving with us. Thank you.
