Helping customers to reduce their climate impact

Sofia Martinsson works as Business Developer Sustainability in Advania Sweden. She joined the company in August 2022 and her focus lies within two of Advania Sweden’s business units, Workplace and Education. Sofia is an expert sustainability resource both to colleagues within Advania's business units and directly to customers who want to improve their sustainability work and reduce their negative impact.

Why is there a need for the role of Business Developer Sustainability at Advania?

Advania’s largest impact on climate today comes from the hardware that we sell. We work constantly to tackle this both by lowering emissions from our offerings, and supporting our customers in reducing their business’s climate impact from, or through, the IT services we provide. I provide sustainability guidance and tools for customers and colleagues and participate in public and private tender consultations with our bid and sales departments.

How do Advania’s customers benefit from your expertise?

With my long-term experience from IT management roles combined with my sustainability skills, I bring a broad sense of business acumen, tech knowledge and business-oriented sustainability. Focusing on not only the obvious environmental and planetary issues at hand but also actual business benefits that arise when moving to more sustainable IT solutions, my ambition is to inspire customers to work with the climate footprint in their value chain and over the lifetime of products and services.

What outcomes have been achieved thus far, and what do you anticipate for the future?

I've been meeting with several of our Workplace and Education customers to shed light on climate issues and sustainable IT solutions. With our climate impact reporting tool ‘Klimatsnurran’, we help private and public customers analyse and understand carbon emissions from their purchased IT and advise them on how to further decrease their footprint.

Traditionally, we met mostly with IT departments and IT managers, but now we broaden our network and include customers’ sustainability managers and purchase functions focusing on sustainability targets. A common challenge for many customers is how to reduce the climate footprint related to life cycle duration and management. We need to challenge the perception of how things ‘used to be done’ and introduce ways to increase re-use and takeback, discuss the curiosity, still paired with hesitation, towards buying refurbished, and the change in perspective from buying ‘just’ products to instead buying functionality for different user groups. We have a few customers leading the way in the development towards refurbished hardware, but it is still quite unusual. This is definitely an area I foresee will grow when customers understand the potential of a more circular approach and move to a low-carbon workplace as a service.

Can you share something you've learned during your time working in this role?

I definitely learn a lot all the time. From customers, from colleagues, from the magical culture of Advania. Both tech and sustainability are fields that evolve and develop at a very high rate, so there are constantly new things to learn and consider, new perspectives to bring together. The strength in working together with colleagues, partners, and customers towards the same overarching sustainability goals is something I enjoy very much in this role.