1. Develop a professional greeting. Don't just say hello and jump into your telephone presentation without taking a breath or allowing the other party to participate. Your greeting should err on the side of formality. Begin with Mr., Mrs. or Ms, as in "Good morning, Mr. Smith." Or "Good evening, Mrs. Jones." Everyone else says, "Hello." Be different. Be professional.
2. Introduce yourself and your company."My name is Sally Smith with ABC Company. We're a local firm that specializes in helping businesses like yours save money." Don't get too specific yet. Don't mention your product. If you do, that allows the other party to say, "Oh, we're happy with what we've got. Thanks anyway," and hang up. By keeping your introduction general, yet mentioning a benefit, you'll peak your prospect's curiosity and keep them on the line longer.
3. Express gratitude. Always thank the potential client for allowing you a few moments in his busy day. Tell him that you won't waste a second of his time. "I want to thank you for taking my call. This will only involve a moment of your time so you can get back to your busy schedule." Don't say that you'll "just take a moment." The feeling evoked by them hearing that you'll take anything from them will put them off.
4. State the purpose of your call. It's best if you can provide the purpose within a question. "If we can show you a way to improve the quality of your product at a lower cost, would you be interested to know more?" This is very likely to get a yes response. At this point, you're ready to start selling an opportunity to meet this person or to get their permission to provide them with more information. You're not selling your product yet--you're selling what your product will do for him.
Sales Call Report Template
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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