The CorsPro blog is here to provide ideas, valuable insights and creative solutions for the presales process.
In our last blog post, Make Your CRM Do More for You, we talked about gaining more productivity from your CRM solution rather than just using its contact functionality. As I like to say, your CRM is more...
The biggest benefits of using a CRM comes down to the first two letters – the Customer Relationship. Proper use of a Customer Relationship Management solution allows for more accurately segmented lists based on buyer personas or buyer’s journey segment (or both). Knowing WHO your buyer is and WHERE on the journey they are allows you to better target your information and even automate your communications.
As a salesperson you don’t want to wait until your project is “in the budget.” By selling your solution “as-a-service” with monthly recurring payments, your solution is always in the budget. Read how to create long-term value and a recurring revenue stream.
A proposal is your chance to influence, persuade, and ultimately convince your prospect. That means you need to appeal to the thing they most care about and are interested in. I’ve got a one-word clue for what that is: “Themself”. Not you, not your products and services, and not your marvelous NOC. Your proposal should totally focus on the challenges your customer is facing and your solution to fix them.
Technology integrators tend to work on large projects that involve a team of people and LOTS of different files that feed into the project. Based on our work with numerous clients over the years, we’ve gathered our top four “best practices” approaches to file management that will make the process more effective and efficient for you.
Take an NEC Anytime configuration quote and create 5 different customer-related outputs including a proposal and scope of work that sets you apart.
It is interesting that many resellers are still not comfortable in this cloud world. They may say they are a cloud provider but the solutions they put in front of a client do not tell this story. The traditional premise proposals they put on the street tell their story well but the cloud version of that proposal is weak, consisting of mostly stock pdf oriented outputs from the provider.
Sales – especially solutions-based sales or complex selling – is no longer about selling the buyer a really cool widget to solve the identified problem at hand. We are all doing research (and tons of it) before we even consider buying anything. The buying (and therefore selling) process has changed.
As sales professionals, we’re always looking for ways to beat out the competition and close the sale more quickly. One of the most important ways this can be done is by presenting our customer with a proposal that stands out relative to the competition.