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Prior to making the first IT sales call to your client, you need to prepare for it. In this article you’ll learn how to get ready for meeting with a client for the first time.

IT Sales: Do Your Homework

Before you even arrive at your first IT sales call with a client, make sure you’ve done your homework. If the prospective client is worth you going out of your way to drive there and spend a half hour or hour or more and then meeting with them for another hour or two, then it’s certainly worth your time to spend 10 or 15 minutes researching their business.

Even more importantly, before you get to that level, properly qualify your prospect. This way you’ll know whether you’re spending your time wisely. Make sure you ask the right questions about size, platform and industry.

IT Sales: Sell Services, Not Products

Do some background research on this prospect ahead of time and start managing their expectations immediately. Make sure that they know that you sell your expertise and solutions and you’re not there to sell them a computer. It’s really, really hard to build a highly successful, profitable business if you’re not focusing on selling the services first and foremost.

If you want to sell white boxes, notebooks, web licenses or peripherals, that’s fine, but certainly don’t lead with that. Make sure that they know that you’re primarily in the services business. Otherwise that prospect may not understand where you’re coming from and might decide to look around and price-shop.

Choose Your Clients

Make sure that they know that you’re a service provider from the beginning of that relationship. You should be looking to interview them as much as they’re interviewing you. Be choosy and find a client you’ll enjoy partnering with for the long term.

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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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.

When you are in the process of your initial IT sales consultation, it is likely that you will be asked to take a look at something while you are there, For example, they may say, “We’ve been having a problem with this router. Could you just take a look at it please?”

Don’t Risk Doing More Harm

What should you do? If it only takes a few minutes, what’s the harm, right? Well, if you get started and you can’t fix it five minutes, you’ll get yourself in hot water. They’re not even a paying client here and you are taking the risk of not being able to fix it quickly or doing further damage–neither of which will help you with IT sales.

Back Away from the computer

Be extremely cautious about sitting down at PCs or touching configurations with servers or laptops or PDAs or anything that could end up getting you in quicksand before there is a signed agreement for an IT audit. The key is to gain IT sales, not do free work.

Even when you’re out doing the technology assessment, you need to be extremely careful to make sure that you’re doing exploratory work that’s very low-risk. You don’t want to end up breaking something. You don’t need a future client or prospect point the finger at you and saying, “Look, you broke it.”

The Bottom Line about IT Sales

So, rather than “take a look”, you need to close the deal. You need to move them from free to fee.