Your IT sales call should not be a long and free session.  You are not available to prospects for free information sessions and need to direct the purpose of IT sales calls to actual sales.  

The purpose of an IT sales call is to see if you and your prospect could work well together and to try to suggest the next step in the process.

IT Sales:  Could You Work Well Together?

The point of an IT sales call is to verify that you and your prospect could have a good working relationship and that the prospect resembles other clients with which you’ve had successful relationships.  If the chemistry is right, you want to spend about an hour or so learning about the prospect’s needs and offering some advice within reason.  

In order to get to IT sales you have to be ready to stop the free advice and shift the conversation towards the process of hiring your firm for an IT audit or tech assessment.

IT Sales:  If You Work for Free, You Will End up Poor

You can’t offer things for free if you want to be good at IT sales.  You need to make a profit, so you need to draw the line at a certain point.  Many small businesses will continue to make you come back time and time again for free if you don’t quickly move the process along to IT sales.

IT Sales:  What Service Are You Selling?

You need to assess your client’s needs and hot spots before you go on the IT sales call.  Think of how you can solve problems before even meeting with prospects and be prepared to offer very quickly a tangible, fixed cost half-day audit for a discounted couple hundred dollars.

If there is a larger opportunity for services of $50,000 or even $100,000, you can afford giving away time more than an hour.  But before each IT sales call, you should count on an hour until you find out more information.

Blogged By:  Joshua Feinberg