More heavy industry experience added to Filtrabit sales team in International Sales Manager Antti Sallinen

Team Filtrabit profile: International Sales Manager Antti Sallinen blends 20 years of heavy industry sales and proposal management experience into formidable insight.

His background includes posts serving the marine industry at ABB, mining and metals industries at Metso-Outotec, as well as environmental clean up at Lamor.

He received his Master of Science (Engineering) degree from Aalto University with a major in Electric Power Systems and a minor in Industrial Engineering and Management.

Is there a throughline to your career as a whole?

“At ABB I was working in the marine business line, helping some of the largest ships in the world with reducing their emissions through Shore-to-Ship Power, optimizing onboard efficiency with variable-frequency drives (VFDs), and the famous Azipod® electric propulsion system.

At Metso-Outotec I got to work on how some of the world’s biggest metal deposits are turned into working mines. Clearly these operations have a huge environmental footprint and our job was to make sure that no stone was left unturned in finding the best efficiencies and approaches to sustainability. Implementing Best Available Technology (BAT) in energy consumption, water recycling and metal recovery was always the goal.

Most recently I worked at Lamor as Director of Proposal and Estimation Management. Lamor’s business is in circular economy solutions and large-scale environmental clean up on land and especially at sea. Oil spill response, remediation and restoration of contaminated land and water, material recycling systems and processes, etc.

In hindsight it’s fairly easy to see a clear throughline in helping clean up vital industries that are considered dirty.”

What did you learn from proposal and estimation management that you apply in sales?

“The foremost learning was probably in the importance of sequencing and prioritization in general. It’s always a matter of tight deadlines, limited resources and a huge potential for costly errors. You learn to start by analyzing and identifying the potential bottlenecks that stand in the way of completing the task as a whole, and what are the must-get-right parts where you should be spending your efforts. Sequencing is primarily about making sure that tasks don’t get stuck waiting for other tasks to get done.

In reality, sales and most other tasks in business – and life for that matter – are no different. It’s just often far less obvious.”

What are some sales practices you believe in and ones you don’t?

“I don’t really believe in case prioritization categories like 1 / 2 / 3. I think most of the time you should make a careful evaluation as a go / no-go decision. If you decide to go, then go full steam ahead or don’t go at all.

What I do believe in, is a big emphasis on understanding and charting the hierarchy of needs of the customer. Again, the sequence matters here and the needs dynamically change places on the hierarchy. Need evaluation phase, solution development phase and commitment phase all have a lot of moving parts that require attention. It’s also important to be involved early, and to find the right Champion inside the customer organization.”

Can you tell us a bit about your personal life?

“My family consists of a wife with a flourishing career of her own, and three daughters aged 16, 15 and 11. As you can imagine, I have my hands fairly full.

Sports and the family, in all kinds of combinations, seem to dominate my use of free time. Along with soccer, I’ve been involved in floorball as a player and a referee for decades.

My daughters are very active as well, competing in soccer and cheerleading, and I do my best in trying to support them. I’m proud to say my middle daughter just won a silver medal representing the Junior All Girl Team Finland in the World Championships in cheerleading.

Being in nature is also something I cherish, and I make an effort to keep it a part of our life as a family.”

How do you see being a referee affecting your outlook on other aspects of life?

“In refereeing, you learn to be decisive under pressure, often operating with limited information. You simply can’t freeze, or even lose your concentration for a few seconds. You have to stay on top of the game at all times. I think it certainly has some parallels in business. Especially in proposal management under tight deadlines.

A certain level of practiced cool-headedness and objectivity doesn’t exactly hurt when trying to raise three children, either.”

What made you decide to join Filtrabit?

“It’s certainly a cliché but true nonetheless – I want to be a part of preserving and even improving the conditions on this planet for our future generations.

But I was also doing that at my last job, so the more accurate answer might have more to do with personal curiosity for working in a smaller growth company. Getting to take more responsibility for planning and prioritizing my own work – exercising creativity to do it, too.

And I’m an engineer by training after all, so there’s a certain attraction to a cool new technology and getting to see in practice, where exactly it can be applied. I want to see that snowball picking up speed and size as we get rolling even more. I specifically wanted to get back into sales.

I also had a very good hunch about the team and the individual personalities in it. I have to say that so far it’s been proving correct. I’m having a genuinely good time working with the people here.”

About Filtrabit
Filtrabit is a Finnish manufacturer of industrial-scale dust extraction systems. Filtrabit’s solution effectively extracts microparticles from industrial dust-laden gas streams, which helps reduce air pollutants from industrial sources and accelerate emissions reductions through the reuse of recovered raw materials.