AIESEC and Mercuri - a Long-Lasting Partnership

For more than 60 years, AIESEC in Finland has been a place for young people to explore the ambition of their future. The focus in the recent years has been mainly on youth leadership and international student exchange.

During all this time, AIESEC in Finland has never stood alone, but was always supported by partners on national as well as local level. One of these organizations is Mercuri International. The cooperation has existed for years and AIESEC in Finland is proud to consider Mercuri International as one of their longest and most supporting partners.

Mercuri International cooperates with AIESEC, because it is a way to support the development of young people and it gives them the opportunity to access talented young students and recent graduates from Finland, as well as from all over the world.

In our long partnership, Mercuri International has given AIESEC the support in educating our members in Sales strategies. To enhance this knowledge in as many individuals as possible, Mercuri International has supported our conferences with speakers for workshops. Also for years, AIESEC in Finland has been awarding their best performing members and local teams with the AIESEC in Finland SUCCESS Awards, which are sponsored by Mercuri International in the means of a participation in one of Mercuri Internationals’ highly recognized development programs.

In March 2009, Mercuri International participated once more in AIESEC in Finland SUCCESS Seminar. Margo Kangasiemi, a training consultant, gave a 2.5 hour session for 16 sales responsibles of the local teams. The group of young students had different knowledge backgrounds in the fields of sales, some already having worked as entrepreneurs and looking for new perspectives in sales, and others being completely new to the topic and hoping to get a general overview and losing their fear of selling.

 According to Margo, “selling is building a trustworthy and good relationship with the customer. For that a sales person needs to be a good observer and listener in order to find the needs of the customer and fit these needs as well as make the product valuable for the client. The customer decides in favor for the product more on his own feelings than on facts. Therefore it is important to build a strong message that can influence the customer in the right way.”

During the workshop, Margo tried to focus on all needs of the participants. Due to the changes in the global environment, a sales responsible needs to be quicker and learn constantly, to develop new ideas and keep up with the constant changes in society. He explained more concretely the sales process and how to book a visit with a future client and make him interested in the product during the first contact. This was also tried out in practical training units. There the main learning point was that a long term partnership can only exist after a good relationship building and a constant customer relationship management. It is important to have a positive atmosphere in negotiations and a good sales person should always try to build a dialog. And not just asking questions, but asking the right questions and this way getting a better understanding of the needs of the company and a feeling for a possible cooperation.

For both of them the session was dynamic and interactive, giving them up to date information and new perspectives on sales. They felt that the speaker had the experience and knew what he was talking about. Ville felt that the concepts were new to him, but easy to understand, which made him take the most out of it. For Lauri, the session in general was good and he enjoyed the work in groups, but for him the whole truth about selling was missing. Even though the audience had some challenging questions, not all could be answered mostly due to a short amount of time, but also due to the different knowledge levels of the participants.

All in all, both Ville and Lauri would participate again in the workshop. According to Lauri ”it is all for the career and I want to improve my own skills. As it is about learning experience, I try to analyze my skills, which I get from different workshops and also use them in the future.”.