The IT sales call or initial consultation is mostly about qualifying the lead. If you dont, 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 youre 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, its kind of like youre playing computer Jeopardy instead of focusing on IT sales. Theyre asking you all of these questions, throwing you all of these curve balls, and theyre picking your brain.

Sooner or later you really have to be able to draw that line and say Hey look, you know weve been talking an hour or so. I have six pages of notes on my legal pad describing all of the problems youve been telling me about. I think the next logical step would be XYZ or Lets talk about what were 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, whats going to come second, third, and fourth.

As part of this survey, youll give your client a report. Youll 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 wasnt that serious in the first place.

Copyright MMI-MMVI, Computer Consulting 101 Blog. All Worldwide Rights Reserved. {Attention Publishers: Live hyperlink in author resource box required for copyright compliance}