How to Sell Robots in the Industry

I recently started writing a book, or better said, a sales instruction book, about how to sell robots in the industry. Since this is a field that is largely new and filled with knowledge gaps, there is almost no material out there, and I know many people will benefit from my expertise.

Why robotics sales is different

While it's true that the sales fundamentals for AI robotics are similar to other big B2B deals, some things are genuinely different: the curiosity, excitement and fear that humans have towards robots, and questions you don't get in any other industry. Will robots replace us? Will they be vandalised? What are the data security issues and who owns it? And how do you sell for an industry where many start-ups build robots that are not even market-ready yet?

So far, the name of the book is How to Sell Robots in the Industry. It applies MEDDPICC, the enterprise sales methodology I use every day, to exactly these situations. Long sales cycles, pilots that lead nowhere, buying committees nobody maps, and specific human emotions that no SaaS playbook can prepare you for. Robotics has a sales problem, and almost nobody has written honestly about how to fix it.

Why I'm writing it

I'm not writing it because I dream of being an author. I'm writing it mainly for three reasons:

First, to structure what I actually know. When you sell robots every day, you build instincts: which pilots will convert, which 'interested' prospects are just curious about the technology, which number makes decision makers lean forward, how to answer the replacement question without losing the room. Instincts are very useful, but so are written frameworks. Since I am building a Sales organisation, I need to provide this structure for future employees joining my company.

Second, because the industry needs it. Robotics is full of brilliant engineers building machines that solve real problems, like labor shortages that aren't going away and work nobody wants to do at 3am. And then those machines sit in warehouses, sometimes because nobody translated the specifications into cost per square meter, and sometimes because the product simply wasn't ready or the market shifted in a different direction. Both are sales problems, just different ones, and the book covers both sides honestly. That translation between technology and business is also my company's whole reason to exist.

Third, because commercialisation is the bottleneck, not the technology. The robots mostly work. What's missing are people who know how to sell them. And in this industry, bad selling doesn't just kill one deal. Every failed pilot, every overpromised deployment makes the next customer more skeptical, for all of us. Every good deployment does the opposite: it opens a market. So if this book helps one founder run a better pilot or one sales engineer qualify harder, the whole industry moves faster. And I want to be in an industry that moves fast.

What happens next

So that's the project. I'm looking forward to writing some articles here while the book advances. Since artificial intelligence accelerates writing quite a bit, I can't say exactly when it will be ready, but I expect a couple of months.

The book is aimed both at robotics founders and at sales engineers looking to enter the robotics business.

Best, Verdi