An old friend of mine who started life as a techie is now a successful salesperson.  Listening to some of the challenges I faced he give me some pointers about sales that addresses my engineering background.

TIPS

1. People are resistant to change – The value you deliver should be compelling enough for them to adopt it.
2. Talk to the person for whom your product/service makes a big difference
3. Target the solution to the right audience – You might have several great features which you personally like, but you should highlight those that would solve the unique problems faced by that prospective client.
4. Quantify, measure, re-evaluate, and re-invent your sales strategy – In many ways sales is like an engineering process.
5. Listen and don’t challenge – Techies tend to argue and get into information/IQ wars which is detrimental to the sales process.

One or more of these tips were able to solve all my problems.

Problem 1: I did a presentation to a company which was very eager to use DocSnaps.  But after the presentation, not only were there no questions, but it took me an additional month to close the sale.

Solution 1: Always start a presentation by asking the audience about some of the problems they face, and get an idea of what is important to them.  If possible tailor your presentation to different segments.  In my case I was gloating over a particular feature of our product that was perceived as a threat to the job security of some people in the audience.

Problem 2: An accountant who was very interested in our solution only had a few of his customers use our product even after 2 months of usage.  I was expecting a lot more would sign on…

Solution 2: The problem was not that the accountant was not interested enough, it was just that the message was getting diluted when he spoke to his clients.  I was not selling to the right person.  The people who were making the buying decision in this case were his clients.  Eventually I did a presentation for his clients specifically geared towards their needs with a lot more success.

Problem 3: A company called hubspot was blogged by Techcrunch which has a following of close to 1 million readers, in May, 2008.  As expected there was a surge in website visitors to hubspot.  But how many of these did they convert to paying customers? 2.

Check out their blog.

Solution 3: Was it because 1 – It was not compelling enough? 2 – Techcrunch readers were not the right audience? 3 – Techcrunch did not highlight the right features on their website (this happens when a 3rd party such as an independent blog or newspaper reports on you) ? The company did some analysis and concluded that TC readers were not their target market.  The solution here is that now they know what to expect (or not) if they decide to target websites similar to TC.

For a Web 2.0 company, the way to incorporate these sales tips is by effectively communicating with customers through public facing channels like the website, blogs, forums, and engaging them in candid dialog.