When you meet with prospective clients, are you simply giving the same presentation over and over again? Could you do it in your sleep? And speaking of sleep, have you ever had anyone nod off during your presentation?
While qualified leads are pretty valuable, closing sales and contracts with new potential clients is even more valuable. In this short post, you’ll learn some simple IT sales strategies that can help you close deals faster with new clients .
If your company is a Microsoft cloud partner, it’s easy to think that your marketing and sales process must essentially create demand for an entirely new category of IT services. And you’d be half right. However there are several pain points from “yesterday” that cloud solutions address that have literally been on the map for over a decade.
Does your managed services website need to attract more of the right visitors? Does it need to convert more leads and close more sales? If you answered “Yes” to these questions, you’re definitely in the right place! In this article, you’ll learn nine MSP marketing tips that help you convert more website visitors into leads and close more sales from these new leads.
In this article, you’ll learn seven sales tips to help you to persuade clients to sign up to a computer consulting contract. These tips should help you address any concerns your customers may have and encourage them to “sign on the dotted line.”
If you provide network maintenance services to your clients, it’s well worth giving constant consideration to other complementary services you could offer. This is essentially the art of “cross-selling” and “up-selling” and can result in substantial extra revenue. This simple article presents you with five extra services you could consider selling alongside network maintenance.
How does your company typically structure an IT maintenance contract? Two popular models are per user or per device, both of which usually involve a monthly, all-in (all inclusive) fee, based on the number of system users or network devices. This article explores both of these models to assist you in choosing which would work better – for your business and for your clients.
If you are in the business of selling computer maintenance contracts, it may seem strange for someone to suggest that it may serve you well to refuse to take on certain clients. However, all established IT businesses are likely to have come across some problematic customers, who, for various reasons, can prove to be more hassle than their contracts are worth. This article discusses some of these clients.
If you’re selling IT maintenance services, you’ll probably find that you rarely “close the deal” during an initial client meeting. Usually, a potential client will want you to send them a formal proposal, detailing your services and prices. The quality of your proposal will often determine whether you win the business, so it’s essential to get it right. Here are some tips.
If you’re eager to move your customers away from a traditional break / fix or hourly payment model and onto IT managed services, you’ll need to put some thought into how best to sell the idea to them.
Many IT support companies are doing their best to move all of their clients in the direction of the managed services model. However, there will always be some clients who are reluctant to move away from the break/fix model and onto a regular monthly fee. Here are three strategies that could help you convince some of these doubters.
Offering to perform a technology assessment for a new or existing client can be a great way to generate new business for your IT firm. A technology assessment is sometimes described as an “IT audit” or “site survey.” Essentially, the idea is to review every facet of a client’s IT infrastructure and point out problems, risks, shortcomings and potential areas for improvement. In this article, you’ll learn about a six step plan to begin to provide technology assessments for your clients.
When you’re selling IT solutions to small business clients, do you have an easy time or a difficult time establishing your value proposition? And is it easy or difficult to command higher hourly billing rates? In this IT sales tutorial, you’ll learn 10 ways to improve your marketing and sales process, so that you’re selling IT solutions to much better clients, with a lot less sales resistance, and for much higher, premium hourly billing rates. If any of these struggles sound familiar, you need to stop leaving money on the table and watch this tutorial now.
Locally-owned computer support services face a variety of competitors; some of which are easy to beat at their own game. Others, such as national competitors, are more challenging to surpass. For many, the nationally-owned competitor is one of the more feared battles. This is especially when prospective clients are non-technical small business owners that are smitten over a nationally-recognized brand, and have relatively little experience in purchasing outsourced computer support services. In this post, you’ll learn how to sell against “Best Buy for Business.”
Are your IT sales calls productive? Or do you often feel like you're playing the small business IT version of the television gameshow, Jeopardy, with Alex Trebek? "Alex, I'll take WiFi Security for $1,000!" IT sales calls shouldn't be about participating in half-baked attempts at a screening process. These meetings also shouldn't be about providing free consulting.
Every IT marketing guru under the sun will tell you just how important the follow-up process is. Some experts on selling managed services may even give it a fancier name like “lead nurturing” or my favorite, “moving leads down the sales funnel.” But when selling managed services, you can’t just keep calling and asking, “Are you ready to buy yet?” (The phrase gets “old” very fast. Like when the kids are sitting in the back seat of the car on a long trip whining, “Are we there yet?”) You need some hook, a “reason why”, an excuse to call, write, e-mail or visit. This list provides 29 reasons for you to stay in touch with your best leads and influencers over an extended period of time.
While many newbies think that the IT sales process ought to use freebies as a lubricant, or accelerant of the sales cycle, catering to freebie-seekers can be an enormous time and resource drain. In this article, we’ll look at how to tell if your IT sales process has become overly-dependent on freebies.
How much control do you have over the IT sales process that you face with prospective clients? A while back, we came across an animated satire video that pokes fun at Fortune 1000 IT procurement.
All too often when selling IT, you’ll spend all of your time and resources to get the sales appointment and submit the proposal, but yet completely drop the ball when it comes to following up.
If you own or manage a computer support firm, you know firsthand just how nerve-wracking the last week of the month can be if the revenue you’ve booked is way below your expectations. But when you have a good handle on forecasting your future sales, and really understand your sales funnel pipeline, you can take a lot of the uncertainty and anxiety out of the equation.
There are two components of IT sales presentations – convincing the prospect of the solution’s technical merits and of its financial value.
Hollywood has created the image of the loud, back-slapping sales rep that most people equate with the profession. No doubt there are salespeople of that type earning a good living—in some markets—but not in technology sales.
Let’s make this very simple: No! An IT support company that sells IT services to local small businesses, and is itself a very small business, should definitely not attempt to hire a commission-only salesperson. While we’d love to stop right here, the typical reader has already made up his or her mind that hiring a commission-only salesperson make sense and that it’s just a matter of finding a website or resume of someone ready to jump at this opportunity. But not so fast! Here are six big reasons why an IT support company should not hire a commission-only salesperson.
It seems every few months we get asked for advice on what small business VARs and MSPs should do to provide sales training to newly hired staff. Consider the following 10 tips for training a newly hired sales person, especially someone with very limited experience in the IT channel.
If you’re selling outsourced IT support, you’re sure to encounter potential customers who are considering handling their IT internally. If these customers need convincing of the value of an outsourced model, it’s useful to have the key benefits clear in your head, so you can emphasize them as part of the sales pitch. Here are three things to highlight.
Telecom services, specifically carrier services, are in-demand. To help attendees zero-in on the best opportunities in this space, the CompTIA ChannelCon conference featured a panel discussion on Best Practices in Selling Telecom.
If you’re new to technology sales in the small business segment, you may be tempted to think that reaching its decision makers is pretty simple. It can be, but not so fast. While selling to small business decision makers can be a lot simpler than technology sales in a Fortune 500 environment, the fragmentation among small businesses means that you need to have a well thought-out game plan to avoid wasting time and resources. With that in mind, here are three tips for succeeding in this space:
If you’re new to consulting sales, you may be thinking that you need a good, systematic way of reaching the right decision makers. And you’d be half right. But when selling consulting services, you’ve got to realize that small business decision makers are vastly different than Fortune 1000 decision makers. And while small businesses almost always have much smaller budgets than their Fortune 1000 brethren, selling to the small guy has plenty of advantages. In this post, we’ll look at what you need to know to get started with IT-centric consulting sales.
When technology providers are learning how to sell IT solutions, their first inclination is often to turn to established channel partner programs in the hope of finding an effective “canned” sales pitch. When you take this kind of shortcut, you run the huge risk of your marketing looking just like every other solution provider in town…a surefire way to degrade your business into that of a commodity broker. However, if you have a basic plan of attack on how to positions your company authoritatively, you shorten your sales cycle, eliminate many potential objections, and close sales faster and with better margins.
Close more IT sales faster with seven simple steps (pages 3-5)
Learn how to dramatically boost your closing rate while improving your company's cash flow at the same time (pages 5-6)
Find out how to virtually eliminate credit risks that can interfere with your IT sales compensation (pages 8-10)
Discover five key steps for closing more recurring revenue IT sales faster and with higher margins (pages 12-14)
