The IT sales call or initial consultation is mostly about qualifying the lead. If you don't, you may waste a lot of time on prospects that just want to pick your brains and really have no intention on hiring you. This can happen real easily when you're moving into small businesses IT sales. In this article, you'll learn how to move on to the next step.
Don't Let Prospects Play "20 Questions"
People will call and they start giving you a bunch of interview questions. They start grilling you and before you know it, it's kind of like you're playing computer Jeopardy instead of focusing on IT sales. They're asking you all of these questions, throwing you all of these curve balls, and they're picking your brain.
Sooner or later you really have to be able to draw that line and say "Hey look, you know we've been talking an hour or so. I have six pages of notes on my legal pad describing all of the problems you've been telling me about. I think the next logical step would be XYZ or Let's talk about what we're going to do next."
When you and your prospect reach the point that you're done with the IT sales presentation, move on to the next step. The next step would be to have you, your systems engineer, or technician come back and spend a couple of hours to take a site survey.
A Site Survey is a Great Next Step
The site survey will inventory all of their problems and help you sort through them. In this way, the two of you can reach a decision on what is going to come first, what's going to come second, third, and fourth.
As part of this survey, you'll give your client a report. You'll document everything so they know where they are with security, software licensing, data protection, etc.
The Bottom Line about IT Sales
So, once the IT sales call is coming to a close, you ask them if they would be interested in the site survey and explain to them what it is and how it will help them. This would be your first attempt at a close. Otherwise, you can sit around for hours and hours just to find out that the customer wasn't that serious in the first place.
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