A critical part of the first IT sales call is lead qualification.  If you don’t properly qualify a lead, you will waste a lot of time on a prospect that just wants to get free advice and does not intend to hire you.  This situation crops up a lot with small business IT sales.  How can you get beyond it?

No “20 Questions”

Leads and prospects will call and start interviewing you.  They will ask you tons of questions until you feel like you are on a game show and not trying to get IT sales.  You need to be able to cut them off at a certain point.  After an hour, explain to them you have a lot of notes describing all their problems and that you would recommend they go to XYZ as the next steps or else talk about what they can do next.  

When you are done with your IT sales presentation, you need to move past it.  The next logical step in IT sales is having a systems engineer or a technician come back later and spend a couple hours on a site survey.   

Why a Site Survey?

The site survey inventories problems and helps you sort through them.  You and your prospect can then decide what you should do first, second, third and fourth.  The survey should also include a report for your prospect/customer.  Document everything you do so you know where the prospect is in terms of security, software licensing, data protection and everything else.

The Main Idea with IT Sales

IT sales means stopping the brain-picking and asking prospects about doing a site survey.  Explain how moving forward will help them and try to close a sale.

Added By:  Joshua Feinberg