Business Consultants

Archive for the ‘Marketing & Sales’ Category

In the UK, call centres are extremely popular places to work. They’re great places for staff to learn about themselves and how they handle customers in general – even with the added difficulty of not being in front of them. They also offer great benefits to you as an employer.

The following are just a few examples of how UK call centres can positively fulfil both employer and employee.

Employers stand to benefit from the relatively low costs of contracting a call centre for several reasons. As your primary base of customer communication, you can control the content of your employees’ scripts so that it gives just the right impression to your inbound callers. You can also train your staff to handle a wide range of computing applications, so that you can offer a wide range of services from just one location.

On the benefits from the employee’s side, they will gain pleasure through interacting with the public and handling their queries in a polite manner. Sorting out a problem for another is one of the most rewarding parts of a call centre job. Training-wise, they will be able to challenge themselves with learning new software that may help them in a more advanced position further down the line. Alternatively, incentives to learn new skills and diversify may be rewarded by the employer financially.

Also, employers are able to collate statistical information about how satisfied their customers are, or how the call centre is performing remotely. Regular reports can be sent to the employer that will make sure that the call centre is meeting service level agreements or performance targets.

For employees and call centre managers, having targets is an attainable measure of success. The actual recording of this information doesn’t have to be to laborious for either party either, as it can be done automatically by computer.

The first piece of advice in marketing to strangers is to stop selling products as your lead entrée, as your foot in the door with IT sales. It’s not about selling products. It’s about selling “you incorporated.”  In this article you’ll learn how to get away from selling products and start selling your expertise.

IT Sales: Where Can You Add Value?

Stop selling the plain, ordinary products by themselves and start selling the value of your company.  Stop selling to product-only customers. Stop competing on price alone when you can’t bundle in value-added services. The only way that you’re going to be able to substantially grow your company and survive and thrive over the next several years is to think about where you can add value and where you can sell services.

Think about how you can sell you incorporated. How can you transform your whole marketing approach so it’s not about reaching customers anymore? It’s about reaching clients; long-term clients who need to engage with you over an extended period of time as outsourced IT. Stop thinking that you need to have the rock bottom lowest prices in your specialized niche, business to business. You don’t to experience good IT sales.

IT Sales: Your Expertise Sets You Apart

There are hundreds of people in your area who can do all the easy stuff, but you’re doing the hard stuff and you know this industry better than they do. You know there are only a couple other people in this whole region that can do what you do. Now you are no longer working with a price-sensitive buyer.

IT Sales: Your Experience and Niche Demands Higher Rates

When you’re not dealing with price-sensitive buyers, you can add a little bit to your margins. B2B clients know they have to pay more for the convenience and the value of your expertise that’s specific to their business.

Think about this new frame of mind in every marketing and advertising promotional message you put out there. It’s all about you incorporated, not the brands that you sell.

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.