Welcome to the Fundamentals of Technology Sales for Everyone. I'll be your instructor for this module. My name is Jon Lau. Little bit about my background. Again, my name is Jon Lau. Master's degree from Cornell University. Bachelor's Degree from University of Maryland, Baltimore County. After completing my Masters some years ago, I entered a career for 17 years as a technology consultant and as a sales and business development executive. It was extremely rewarding career. I worked for many high-tech companies, very successful over the years. Got to travel the world, had a lot of fun, met lifelong friends. But then at some point, an opportunity came up to get into the world of training and education. I thought maybe a change might be worth a try. I gave it a try and I've never looked back. I've been doing that for the past 11 years and I've enjoyed that immensely as well. Right now, I'm part of the faculty of the technology sales program. I think I like this program more than anything else that I teach in or take part in because the opportunity that it presents to the students as well as it relates so directly to my own prior career. What is technology sales? Quite simply, it's selling the products and services of technology companies to clients as an employee of that technology company. A sales executive, or their various titles of roles, but basically you're in the sales organization or sales department of a technology company and you are marketing and selling their products and services to companies to provide business solutions. You're not doing it alone. Typically you're working with a team, so you're not expected to be the individual expert and know everything. You usually have a team of people that you're working with in your tech company that is working with you. You're usually one of the leads of that team to make sure that the client is successful with that technology. What technologies are we talking about? Well, it could be any technology, really. As we all know, technology is revolutionizing in the world and changing the way we work and operate in all fields. Whether it's medicine, energy, with clean energy, emerging communications with cellular, wireless, 5G, and really just so many areas where technology makes an impact. In this course, we're going to focus on information technology specifically. But that said, most of the skills you'll learn here will be transportable if you ended up moving into one of the other technology fields. Other than the terminology or the specific technologies being sold, the skill sets and the thought process are large or the same across different technological areas. Why we might want to focus on information technology? The global IT industry, and IT is the common term for information technology, the global IT industry is a five trillion plus dollar industry and growing. It continues to be one of the fastest growing industry. The opportunities for careers is unlimited and it's one of the best fields to work in. It's also an exciting field in terms of the kinds of things that you get to work with. Well, to briefly dive a little bit more into information technology and what it is, to provide a little more context for the types of things that we might be focusing on in the areas that we look at. The most basic definition of information technology is using computers to store, manipulate, transmit information. Also, way to provide some value or service to someone, whether it's within a business or external to a business. Most often, the term IT is used in the business world. You might hear with things like retail technologies like your phones and cellular more as just tech in general. IT, often when we say that it is applied in the business world, how are computers and information processing applied to solve specific business problems? Gartner, which is a large IT industry analyst company, they broaden the definition a little bit. Not just to computers, but really to the entire spectrum of technologies that are used in information processing. That could be software and apps, any form of hardware, the computer being the most common, but also your mobile device is increasingly playing a role in the business world. Communications, things like 5G, the Internet, and then a variety of specialized technologies. Many of us may have heard the term Internet of Things or IoT. That's a big emerging trend of putting little Internet sensors throughout a business to automate certain processes. Any of these technologies that move or store information for the purpose of empowering, enabling, or accelerating business really is what we're talking about with IT. You'll also sometimes hear the term Enterprise IT. Typically, what that means is applying information technology in a large enterprise, so a big company or a big government agency. Just taking a little closer look at some of the moving parts. On the right here, you have a diagram which just shows the computer world. That's you or me as the user, we use applications which you can also call software or apps, that could be a spreadsheet, it could be your email package, web-browser. Those are all your applications. Those sit on top of the operating system that runs on your computer, which could be Windows, could be macOS, could be iOS on your iPhone device or Android if you have an Android phone. All of those are on some sort of hardware, which the aforementioned, either a Mac, a Dell PC, for example, an iPhone or an Android phone being the most common, but there is some other specialized are for tablets, etc. That's the top bullet on the left really is just showing the picture of the one we're most familiar with, which is the computing layer and the operating system being the Windows or the Mac. Enterprise storage refers to all of the disk and other specialized storage technologies that are in place in an enterprise. If you can think about it, a bank or a company like a Walmart stores so much data, terabytes and terabytes, even petabytes, which is 1,000 terabytes of data, and that data is always growing. Enterprise storage is a very big business. Network equipment, all of the cables, wires, routers, switches. We're all familiar with our home cable router. Well, in big business, those things can take up an entire rack just for one industrial grade router. Those typically sit in the company data center. Security, that's referring to cyber security. Protecting all of that information. Databases is the structured software that stores the company information, customer information in a structured form on the enterprise storage. Then enterprise software refers to a specialized class of software or applications that are used in business to perform very specific functions. For example, you may have heard of a package called salesforce.com, which manages customer records and sales process. It's payroll. All of the processing of paychecks in a company, that's typically a large software package. Enterprise software is a very key part of every business or a government agency. Now, a lot of that is mainstream technology, it's been around for years. Although there's still plenty of opportunity there, those companies still continue to grow as the amount of data and the data processing continues to grow. There's this class or segment of technology that has high growth in emerging technology. That's really more the leading edge of technology where a lot of the revolutionary technologies are happening. You can think about the Internet as being that way in the late '90s and I actually took part in. That was the early part of my tech career. Over two of the biggest areas right now, which the next two models in this course will focus on, are cybersecurity and the cloud. These are really just revolutionary technological areas that we've all heard of them now. They're terms that we recognize for at least 10 years. We're just in the leading edge of the growth of both those technologies. There are thousands of both established and emerging and growing cyber and cloud companies, large, medium-sized, and small. The one that I can tell you is that they all need good sales professionals and they all will pay them very well as well.
