You have to show prospects and clients how special you are if you want to secure IT sales.  What benefits can you offer clients that will make you stand out?  Distinguish yourself in order to achieve success in IT sales.

Location is Important

Say you moved into a new location in a 27-story building housing mostly sophisticated firms.  Similarly, this building is in a neighborhood full of the same types of buildings and businesses.  Should you use this benefit to help you with IT sales?  The answer is emphatically, “Yes!”  

You can take over the neighborhood in that situation.  Your benefit and point of IT sales is that you are right there and can get things done better, faster and cheaper than others that are not in the immediate area.

IT Sales:  How Do You Make Yourself Stand Out?

You can improve your chances of IT sales by selling service agreements and offering a response time guarantee.  If you’re in the neighborhood already, you can make these types of promises.  Tell prospects you can be there in 60 minutes or less during a server-down emergency that falls into regular hours.  You can offer $100 off a bill that month as further incentive if you are a minute late.   Having enough clients in the area and local staff will make work feel like you’re doing it on a corporate campus.  There’s no travel time, and you can increase staff utilization rates simply without worrying about parking, traffic or driving time.

How Do You Find Businesses for IT Sales?

If you are right in the thick of things, how can you find local businesses?  You can do a survey, a mailing to every owner or CEO in the building and in neighboring buildings.  You can offer special benefits, such as gift certificates or bagels at the coffee shop across the street if the business owners return the surveys and respond.

The IT Sales Survey:  What Should Go in It?

1.    How many PCs are there?

2.    How many employees?

3.    Who currently provides your IT support?

4.    What do you like and dislike about the support you get or have received in the past?

5.    What is the top business challenge you currently face?

6.    What’s the top IT challenge you currently face?

The survey acts as a way to get prospects to respond and get closer to IT sales.  You find out what people want and their level of interest.  The survey should produce a good response rate in a neighborhood full of qualified leads and can help make you known within your community.

IT Sales:  Know People That Know People

You should use a good location as a chance to meet the locals.  Talk to the local shoe repairperson, food delivery person, pizza shop owner or deli owner, mail carrier and FedEx and UPS drivers.  You can network yourself into all the offices in the area and get closer to IT sales if you start talking to the other people that see them all the time.

Blogged By:  Joshua Feinberg