Intervju med Miska Ahokas
Program: Master's program in Business Development and Internationalization
Start of education: 2014
Title: Associate Sales Representative in Cisco Sales Associate Program
Company:
Cisco Systems
Nationality:
Finland
Country of residence:
Sweden
A few words about your daily work tasks and responsibilities:
At the moment I’m participating in Cisco Sales Graduate program, which will prepare me to become Account Manager for Cisco Systems. My daily work varies a lot. The main responsibility is to take care of your named accounts and drive business through distributors and partners. This means discussions, meetings and workshops with customers with the goal of helping them to keep up with the digitalization. The Cisco Sales role differs a lot of more traditional sales roles. We are not selling directly to customer but through our partners which makes my job to be more as a partner manager or consultant for the customers. Digitalization is now a thing that is shaking all industries which means everything becomes connected and there Cisco’s value steps in. In short, my daily work: - communicating with partners and keeping good view of the market - Discussing with customers about their current business problems - pricing - developing our partners
A few words about your career:
Still quite early in my career. The goal for me is to develop my skills in sales and more specific sales in IT. I expect a long career at Cisco as it provides an endless career path which means you can always learn something new and develop yourself. It’s a growing business.
Any advice you would like to current students:
I can share my personal opinion about where you should apply for work and why. It has been that the business school graduates first options for future work are in Consultant companies like BCG, Accenture etc. Also, the one main option has been in investment banks and banking in overall. My advice is that seeing the world developing and things like Big Data, IOT and IOE changing how companies do business (like UBER) have raised the importance of IT. IT will no longer be just a thing at the backside of the business making sure the internet is working. IT will become the most important front of the business as it has effect on all verticals in a business. I see that IT should be considered as a good option next to consultant and banking.