Get IT Sales By Getting IT Folks Out Of Their Fort

Get IT Sales By Getting IT Folks Out Of Their Fort:from Business 2 Community by Lawrence Anderson
IT sales come from IT sales leads. IT leads require a thorough analysis of prospects prior to qualification. Qualification in turn demands you play close attention to each prospect’s needs. However, seeing as how Business Intelligence caters to another business market, their needs are the natural reflection of the needs coming from their own customers.
Unfortunately, the problem of your IT prospects is strongly similar to a common problem when closing IT sales: getting stuck inside the IT tech fort.

Entering The Fort To Find The IT Sales Inside

This will not be the first time that today’s IT revolution is calling for CIOs to lower the gates and come out of their fortress. This is neither the first time BI is required to be customer-centric in order to achieve IT sales. In fact, just a few days ago, Forbes just published an article written by Bob Evans of Oracle and the following excerpt only continues to fuel the demand for change:
“No one’s suggesting IT organizations become front-line salespeople—but what Murphy is suggesting is that without clear and first-hand awareness of customer needs, desires, and concerns, CIOs and their IT teams are at great risk of becoming less and less relevant to the ultimate goals and purposes of their companies.”
In the above excerpt, Evans is expressing agreement with a similar statement made by Chris Murphy of InformationWeek (with Evans citing an excerpt himself). This should be the focus of your IT sales team if you want your IT services leads continue to convert into IT sales.
Just as they must take after the customers of their own business, you too must take after that desire. How so? By encouraging them to get out of their fortress and start positioning the offers you make. Normally, conventional marketing system would have you closing IT sales by sticking to what the customer wants.
But in this case, when customers are directly or indirectly demanding BI focus more directly on their experience, your IT sales would have a higher value far into the long run if you consider focus on them instead. This is not the same as ignoring the needs of the your B2B customers.
Rather, your IT sales leads should be processed while getting a prospect to understand the importance of getting out of their fort and being more direct in their understanding of their own customers. Take a look at how some of the usual ways you would market for IT sales leads and qualify them. They put you in the good position to share increase awareness from interest and spread more information.

• IT Telemarketing – A telemarketing call can double as an evaluation when qualifying IT sales leads. This evaluation has the added effect of making prospects consider their IT roles.
• Social Media – Social media has been one of the factors behind the call for more customer understanding. Your IT sales leads should be the product of the engagement that social media encourages.
• Event marketing – A live event would fit this revolutionary call perfectly. It is also another popular to generate IT sales leads. It does not take much to piece them together.

The success of IT sales is not just determined by how well you appeal to your prospects. It is expanding your definition of IT sales leads beyond just IT outsourcing leads, IT consulting leads, web hosting leads, cloud computing leads, BI software leads, and other IT potential clients . Star generation your IT sales by getting IT out of its fort!