3 IT Sales Tips

Does your company need to improve its IT sales results? If so, then listen up.

You and your staff can have the most fantastic IT expertise, amazing communication and people skills, and the fastest response time around. But, if you can’t close IT sales to acquire new small business clients, you’ll starve your company out of business.

Here are three ways you can close more lucrative small business sales, with less effort, on a consistent basis: 

1. Build up trust before trying to sell long-term relationships. Many owners of small computer consulting firms, VARs, and MSPs try to close IT sales directly from print and online marketing campaigns. This is a big mistake. Major projects don’t close directly from PPC ads, landing pages, or postcards, no matter how brilliant your headline, copy, and calls-to-action are. But, there are a number of marketing activities worth prioritizing to plant the seeds for these high-value relationships: traditional offline networking through organizations, exhibiting or speaking at targeted trade shows, and sponsoring seminars, to name just a few. All of these activities help build trust with small business decision-makers early in the sales cycle, so you end up with fewer price-sensitive prospects and more value-conscious buyers.

2. Focus on one subset of local small businesses, rather than use the one-size-fits-none approach. Unless you work for a Fortune 500 company, with an eight or nine-figure annual marketing budget, small business is simply too broad a target to hit with a single cost-effective strategy. Most computer consulting firms, VARs, and MSPs obtain much better marketing and IT sales results by focusing on one subset of the small business market at a time. For your situation, perhaps the appropriate subset is small businesses with 10-100 PCs or a vertical market niche, such as legal, hospitality, or health care.

3. Identify whether target decision makers are IT managers: When you start selling to larger small businesses with 50 or more employees, you will often find an in-house IT manager. From an IT sales standpoint, however, you must know ahead of time whether your primary decision maker is a non-technical small business owner or a more hands-on and technically-oriented IT manager. Regardless of whether you call this process building personas or just doing your homework, it is important you identify whether you’re selling to an IT manager or a CEO-type, as these individuals will often have vastly different needs, motivations, and pain points.

In this short post, we examined three ways to boost your IT sales results.

What sales technique has been most successful for you? Please share your tips, hints, and war stories in the comments area below.

And if you're looking for more sales tips that help you grow your business as a whole, be sure to enroll now in our free 7-day eCourse: Go-to-Market Strategy 101 for B2B SaaS Startups and Scaleups.