The main components of IT sales success:
- People
- Product
- Price
- Process
People:
Having good people is of utmost importance. When it comes to selling solutions and specifically software or innovative solutions, I find that having the right members on the team makes a world of difference. IT sales hinges on the world of balance. The balance between being too pushy versus being complacent. The balance of being a good leader, being a good worker oneself and a good taskmaster. It requires sales people having the inherent people skills along with good intuition toward making smart technical and business decisions. We cannot have a technical expert making embarrassing social faux pas and passing it off as geeky eccentricities like a bad episode of Big Bang Theory. Nor can we have larger than life personalities who come across as pompous even if they can back it up with good numbers. Having the support of the right team members means equal work distribution, more trust allowing better communication and lower employee turnover, i.e. people with experience knowing exactly what needs to be done.
Product:
It is not important whether your product is the best in the market or not. What is important is you know exactly how it stacks up against the competition. Having the best quality will always make a sales person’s job easier but that job is not done until he/she knows the reality of their product’s efficacy. This awareness will help them develop the right marketing strategies, the right pricing will help them find the right customers. IT sales are unique as they incorporate an anticipation of new technology and immersive experiences along with the ups and downs of keeping up with new technologies and keeping them relevant and sellable.
Price:
The make or break of every business deal comes down to this. How expensive is your solution and how well you can justify that price against its cheaper competitor to your new and old customers. Price is the only driving point that pushes everyone into searching for the cheapest and most economical production and sourcing practices. It is not enough to just price your solution smartly, it is important to see how to keep the cost of providing that solution down in the present and also in the foreseeable future keeping in mind the inflation, the market trends and consumer habits. Pricing policies affect the entire ecosystem, from procuring the right talent to the right placement of services with the perfect customer.
Process:
Even if the seller gets all of the above right, he/she will never be successful if they do not have the right process in place. They can have the best product, priced perfectly with the best sales team and still flounder if the right sales process is not employed. Therefore, this is where all the sales training is focused. Without the right plan in place, all sales people will struggle to achieve continuous and lasting success. The job of every IT sales manager is to prioritize and avoid randomness. They need to develop their exact sales process based on the set order and time of doing things. My blog about Sales process talks in length about what a sales person actually needs to do in the set time and order.
Now, I want to explain how a salesperson should not be spontaneous about that process. They need to actually develop call zones, a good calling sheet and contact information about good prospects. They need to develop a script that works for leaving voicemails and emails that carry the right tone. They need to develop chains of communication and the right follow up system. Without prioritization of work, it is difficult to formulate daily, weekly or monthly action plans which means more procrastination and less conversion rates.
PEOPLE
To get to the point of having a strong team leading the sales process, with well distributed tasks and cohesive inter departmental smooth functioning requires an effective sales pipeline.
1. The Sales Development Reps – The qualifiers
The first component to increasing your sales velocity is having dedicated Sales Development Representatives. These are the hunters who are incharge of doing the base work. They generate leads and are in charge of connecting good prospects with their supervisors. Their jobs can also entail having a set time frame to respond to emails, queries and general heavy lifting in relation to the early stages of prospecting. They also help the team by helping in the preparation of good presentations and demos by helping source information and background research. It is a huge burden off a main contact’s shoulder by having a person doing the follow up of the prospect’s email by reminding them of upcoming meetings, leaving voicemails and generally qualifying whether or not the lead should be engaged by the main sales rep.
2. The Account Executives – The closers
This sales executive is in charge of closing deals, processing customer payments and moving the sale forward. They are incharge of converting prospects into actual customers and have an army of dedicated executives at different levels in charge of closing operations at that level. Their job is to execute the sales process effectively and convince the customer why they are the best fit for them, thereby having good win percentages.
3. The Customer Success Manager – The farmers
This manager is incharge of activating, on boarding and the general overall success of the account. They should be able to outline key characteristics for each stage of a new account to determine whether the prospect is being properly engaged. Most importantly, they need to focus on achieving the outcome the client aimed to achieve when they chose the seller. This is where the project gets tailored to the customer’s expectations. Upselling and retaining clients is the next key responsibility of customer success managers, as they are responsible for moving things forward for the customers and maintaining the relationship to grow the account.
Read more on the roles a tech sales company here.
PRODUCT:
Product is the reason you are in business. Product, solution, or service is your differentiator. Without a well defined product you might as well not sell anything at all. The product you have should solve a problem. It can also solve a problem in a way that is much better than someone else. But, if your aspiration is to change the world, then it should be something that offers the audience a glimpse of the future. There are a lot of classic examples illustrating the same: aircrafts, computers, smartphones, metaverse are some of them.
The next thing to note is that it doesn’t matter how good your product if it is not marketed the right way. A good example to note is the Blockchain technology. In itself it’s a remakable way to keep records eliminating security breaches and fraud. But even though the technology has been around for long, the reason that it got famous was because of a cryptocurrency that was built on top of this technology, called BITCOIN.
PRICE:
Price not only depends on perceived value and the USP (unique selling proposition) that distinguishes the product from competitors, but also some other cost factors that affect overall profitability. These factors are:
Higher Customer Retention Rates:
The number of clients a company keeps over time is measured by its customer retention rate. It’s calculated as a percentage of a company’s existing consumers that stay loyal over a given period of time. For example, if your company starts the year with ten customers and loses two, your retention rate is 80 percent. If this rate is too high, then it is better for sellers to find new customers who can be charged revised rates for the new financial year.
Authority in the Niche
The leaders in the niche segment are the innovators and innovators always get the lion’s share of growth. That is because they are the first to introduce that technology and therefore are established in the industry with iron credibility. They are usually also the ones whose solutions determine pricing in the industry.
A system that funds Marketing Costs:
As today’s savvy business people know, to have a strong business, people should know who you are and what you have to offer. You need good marketing. The first step is a marketing budget to help you figure out practical steps to achieve those goals. Therefore just having a winning product does not decide its pricing when the biggest cost will be determining how to market that product or service.
Direct Access to the Perfect Customers:
Access to customers goes a long way in setting the right price as all the marketing budget then gets funneled into strategies for growth and innovation. A customer who is a perfect fit and approaches the seller readily also gets the best bargain.
One reason to choose the perfect customer is to reduce the time and effort pursuing prospects that will not buy your solution and product. Instead that time can be spent on more constructive use.
PROCESS:
Step 1: Gaining Access
Prospecting or any other way of lead generation and acquiring new customers is called gaining access and is the first step of any procedure in a sales cycle. You can read about emailing, cold calling or networking in my previous blogs for a comprehensive view of this stage, however, I wanted to share some pro tips here:
Do Not Hesitate to Over Stimulate:
People require more stimulation than ever before to make a decision. Prospects now require more advertising, follow up and reminders than ever, before they react favorably to your action.
You must have perseverance and hang in there without getting discouraged if you don’t see the results quickly.
Identifying access issues:
Prospecting also becomes hard if the reps are facing access issues. Such as difficulty in getting the right emails, updated details and any other relevant statistic before making that actual one list having the ultimate potential customer details. This step requires detailing all the issues that hinder the hunting process and resolving them one by one and eliminating procrastination and actually getting work done.
Most common obstacle:
The most common obstacle a salesperson faces is themselves. It is a lack of attack pattern and failure to connect with people by not doing a regular follow up and having a schedule. A lot of this is due to the mindset needed as a salesperson. Once you are committed to get what you need, the habits and the regimen you follow can clearly show your path to success.
Step 2: Decisions or Change
Sales managers have a responsibility of persuading people to make changes and make that process as easy as possible. This step requires them to start asking critical questions that attack customer pain points. This makes customer education easy as demonstrations and presentations can now be geared towards solving those particular issues. It also helps salespeople find the path of least resistance. Finding the right success stories that resonate with prospects and finding best value that aspires them to trust you and make that leap of faith.
Step 3: Presenting Proposals
This stage is all about building relationships and moving the sale forward to a simple path towards completion. A salesperson has to have a contract that does not get immediately rejected. They need to evaluate their past contracts and see if they have a winning template, something that has worked for them and they can replicate that success. This contract can only be successful by combining all the winning elements; such as the perfect price and the feel of getting more value than the price. This step requires complete education of the customer. Salespeople have a responsibility to converse all the contract points and cover all the minutiae to the customer. Complete transparency before the proposal leads to clear decision making.
Step 4: More Decisions
Discussion of financial impact by their team of experts. Bottom line of resolving the customer problem and the third party decision making process all come under this step where all sales decisions are reviewed by top executives and a team of experts. It is a stage of convincing the top decision makers and sealing the deal. It is the process of establishing and onboarding.
Step 5: Retention
Customer Retention Plan is not a plan that all sales people readily have available because the world is so competitive and unpredictable. However, as with all good after sales service, the sale never ends. It is important to follow up regularly and keep that relationship so that salespeople can retain and even grow the account the next financial year. This will not be possible without customer satisfaction and actual materialization of the perceived value.
CONCLUSION
People form the backbone of your business, hence choosing the right set of people who will in turn form the leadership as you move ahead in your journey. Product (or solution) can give you the edge which will make you stand out of the pack. Price is dependent on the product and the value you bring to the market. Process, the final P, ties it all down and is crucial to help you sustain and expand your business to the next stage of growth.
The four Ps of Tech Sales are relevant for all industries. Focus on getting them right and you’ll have a much smoother path to success.
