If you’re like me, you were a great technician who decided to start your own business. As your company grew, you learned to be a good leader by being the best engineer your company. But sales? In order to be a good sales leader, you have to embrace sales and drive the adherence to a sales process. Not easy when you’re a techie at heart.
The reality is that most IT solution providers suck at sales, so we have boiled down the essential ingredients for sales success to make it easy for you to catch up and even get to the front of the IT sales wolf pack. In our experience consulting with our partners, we’ve seen some partners who are doing some of these steps, and some who are doing none. A rare few are executing all five.
1. Set Sales Quotas: You can’t measure achievement when you have no goals. Sales people need goals to measure success and to enable you to evaluate and reward their results.
2. Enforce Opportunity Recording: Make sure your team records all of their sales opportunities in your system so they are easily track-able and actionable. Don’t let them keep it all in their head or in disorganized disparate systems.
3. Hold Weekly Sales Meetings: Conduct weekly sales meetings at the beginning of each week to focus your sales team on their action plan for that week. Regular public accountability is a powerful motivator. Small team or large, this is vital.
4. Make Sales Capture Easy: Opportunity is everywhere; sales data needs to be easily captured so anyone in your company who finds a potential sale can quickly relay that information to a centralized location. This includes client referrals and even the landing pages on your website.
5. Follow the Sales Process: Choreograph the sales effort of your team and use a repeatable process that includes the 4 other Sales Success ingredients. Follow the best practices and sales process that is built into your professional services automation tool.
Adding those five ingredients will help you increase your sales and profits while adding accountability for your sales staff. Salespeople can easily juggle 20 times more opportunities than they had before, just by following the process and seeing it all in one place.
To hear more about the secrets to winning sales agreements and key strategies for increasing profit margins, you’re invited to join ConnectWise for a free webinar June 22nd with MSP legend Gary Pica, as a part of our Success Wise webinar series.
David Bellini is president of ConnectWise. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsor program. Read all of Bellini’s guest blogs here.
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