Carpe Diem Consulting - Sales & Marketing Blog For Microsoft Partners

Sales Tactics for Tough Times - #2 Get the Field Technical Staff Spotting Opportunities

Here's a flow of logic that should lead to increased sales:

1. "Qualified Leads" are preferable to "Unqualified Leads"
2. A superior source of Qualified Leads is the existing customer base
3. On-site Technical and Consulting Resources - by definition - only deal with the existing customer base
4. Technical and Consulting Resources are (arguably) more trusted than sales people
5. Technical and Consulting Resources are ideally placed to identify and pass on Qualified Leads.

Great logic - but the only problem is that Technical and Consulting Resources generally aren't trained to spot opportunities - and indeed often object strongly to having to have anything to do with the sales process.

Our research at Carpe Diem, however, indicates that it is possible to train these on-site resources to spot opportunities whilst they're in the field - and by actually explaining what we mean by "sales" it is in fact not difficult to get them to take an active role in spotting real opportunities in the course of their everyday work.

Microsoft believes our research as well - so much so that Microsoft has internally taken on board a 1 day course we have built to train field services staff to identify opportunities whilst in the field - qualify the opportunities - and to then pass these on to sales on their return.  The course is being rolled out by Microsoft in Australia and NZ - and there are a number of Partners already trialling the course.

Check out an overview of the course here.

Perhaps tough economic times provide a good stimulus to critically review the success and potential of ALL your sales people - is it possible you could save significant money by removing the underperformers, and instead rely on your on-site resources to lift the returns from your successful sales people?

The McKinsey view - managing IT spending in tough times

Good article from The McKinsey Quarterly (December 2008) discussing the fact that "businesses badly need to extract value from their IT functions".

This sounds like a real opportunity for proactive sales people.

The flavour of the article is about reducing IT spending which initially sounds threatening - but if we're in partnership with the IT manager, and being proactive, we can add genuine value which will build the relationship into the longer term.

From a Microsoft platform perspective, we should focus on the part of the article that states "improvements can be made with modest investments".  Part of the power of the Microsoft platform is that subsequent minimal investments in different parts of the stack can actually unlock huge ROI from existing software assets.  For example - simply adding a mobility solution can mean a field sales force can better utilise a Microsoft CRM investment - increasing sales, improving customer satisfaction, and reducing downtime and travel costs:  utilising Performance Point Server can tap into deep Business Intelligence functionality that ships with SQL Server 2008.  The list goes on.

But is there urgency?  I suspect if YOU'RE not proactive and your COMPETITOR is - then you might be the one that is targeted for the cost cutting...........