Meet the talent: Aleksandra Perminova

Hello everybody.
I am Aleksandra Perminova, I was born and have lived a long time in Ekaterinburg city, in the Ural mountains. (oh, do you know where it is? Check it here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yekaterinburg)

I have worked both as an entrepreneur and an employee.

My own small company was a beauty studio that provided unique services such as creating hairstyles and teaching customers how to do them themselves. Once the business had a foothold in the market, I closed the business plan cycle by selling the concept and company to a local competitor. Business was profitable and has been run by a new owner for several years.

Then I ran three projects in an SME book company. I was responsible for setting and leading the sales process. The first project was to renew the sales process in one of our branches. After I settled and structured it they were able to continue by themselves.

The second project with discount selling into non-specialized retail failed. We have not been able to overcome the decline in popularity of the books among end-users. Project was closed, fortunately losses weren’t serious because we made this decision at the right time.

The most effective third project was work with libraries and schools, so it became a subdivision for operating with municipality customers.
Skills: sales, customer relationships, fulfil and close a deal.
Because of my adventure spirit - I quit the company to move forward to my new life. I moved to Finland with my family due to my husband‘s job offer 😀.
In January 2019 Suomi welcomed me with fresh shining snow and the flavour of coffee…

I guess I still fall in love with this country every now and then. 💙

I needed some time to get used to being in Finland and I went to a Finnish language and integration course. For my first internship I found a place in a bookstore - I felt like I knew a lot about the market and my experience could be valuable. I wore so many hats working in this market and I was ready to offer the best practices.

I performed outbound calls, some SEO tasks and of course customer support.
Bookmarket is sensitive to langage and I could not imagine that I can continue in the field. I was lucky to use English and my native Russian and some Finnish at work.

It was like a joke, when my friends asked me:
- What are you doing in Finland?
- I sell books!

I signed my first job contract right after this internship. It was relatively smooth to find my first job in Finland. I guess there was a combination of factors: my experience was relevant, the team was friendly, and also I was able to show my attitude during the internship.

It was an amazing opportunity to increase my knowledge and bring my own expertise to the table. I got experience selling and supporting customers all over the world, creating offers for libraries, b2b businesses and private customers in different countries. Sometimes I provided support to customers who wanted to deliver “Suomen mestari” to Africa or sometimes advised what kind of book should be the best gift for a lady who studied Russian as a foreign language in the UK.

I learned business correspondence, delivery terms, how to handle outbound calls in a multilingual environment, and how to deal with communication restrictions on marketplaces. Every day brought new challenges and new tasks which motivated me a lot.

Maybe “paper books market” sounds a little bit old fashioned, but there are a lot of cases of using data: tens of thousands of titles and tens of hundreds of customers that should be handled properly. Evening online meetings with software developers and technical support teams were a part of the routine. We continuously collaborated on developing in house accounting and CRM systems as work to build better tech tools never stopped.

Skills: international sales, business-to-business (B2B), customer support.

My contract ended, so I had free time to pass my exam and received a YKI B1 certificate. Now I continue my lifelong learning and it is time to go forward.
My favourite part of work life is to catch a new idea and have the possibility to prototype and test it, so I think the startup community is suitable for this. Also, I would like to be a part of a diverse team and act in an international environment.

I naturally love sales and I have been pretty successful doing it. My strategy?

I use metrics as tools to be persistent in my numbers and at the same time I am a servant sales fan. I believe that the best selling decisions are based on assisting and problem solving situations for your customers.

Now I am looking forward to sharing my sales method and can-do attitude with EdTech or a future EdTech startup company based in Finland. Do you have any recommendations? Send me a message!