The IT industry is characterized by years of growth. Companies often face the problem that orders cannot be processed or are delayed due to a lack of employees. Not to give the impression that salespeople in the IT sector have an easy life, but the requirements for sales efficiency for IT companies are somewhat different in some cases. The recommendations for sales efficiency in industry also apply to the IT sector and can be found in this article. However, there are additional factors influencing sales efficiency in the IT sector that can be taken into account:
- IT is a trusted asset
- The implementation of the offer can take years
- There is often a lock-in
- Cross-selling can affect another department in the company
Factors influencing sales efficiency for IT companies
IT is a trusted asset
In contrast to products, software is much more difficult to experience. While salespeople from industrial companies can demonstrate machines, it is much more difficult to carry out product demonstrations in IT. Customers are often simply given test access. This can result in the customer perceiving the offer in a completely different way than the salesperson intended. Conversations also often drag on. All the more reason to consider the topic of knowledge building in IT sales. Otherwise, the salesperson can easily struggle against the customer’s “self-inflicted” attitude, which costs time and energy and increases the risk. It is important to assess the level of knowledge in the customer’s buying center at the beginning and to systematically strengthen the customer’s knowledge through sales talks, thereby building trust. This goes far beyond traditional objection handling or solution selling. As the IT offer cannot be “touched” and time is usually far too short, the salesperson must be able to respond to the respective employees in a targeted manner and with options in the approach in order to eliminate knowledge gaps
The implementation of the offer can take years
A big misconception that we have been hearing from IT vendors for years is that they can only communicate with the customer about a project once it has been successfully implemented. In principle, you should communicate the project to the outside world once it has been successfully implemented in order to strengthen recommendations. However, the issue of cognitive dissonance is often overlooked due to a lack of knowledge in the field of basic psychology. IT projects can quickly cost several hundred thousand francs. This means that after signing the contract, customers are very uncertain that they have made the right decision. In most cases, these people are not aware of their own uncertainty. Observe yourself when you make a major expenditure on an offer that you don’t immediately hold in your hands. Do you perhaps go back to the manufacturer’s website once the offer is there, read the email again and think about the pros and cons of the offer? No? Perfectly ok – but most people can observe cognitive dissonance in themselves when they try to become aware of it. For the salesperson, this means that it is essential to flood the customer with more information after the purchase in the so-called “honeymoon phase“.
For example, it is advisable to post the winning project on LinkedIn immediately together with the customer. This reduces cognitive dissonance for the customer and helps them to recommend the project to others well before implementation, which can still be years away. The message is not that we have successfully implemented project XY together, but that the company wants to strengthen its XY and is relying on our offer to do so. In this phase, the focus is therefore on the added value for the customer, which has (hopefully) been worked out before the sale.
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There is often a lock-in
Is an IT salesperson a salesperson at all or no longer a relationship manager? A customer has installed an ERP system. How likely is it that this company will remove the ERP system after three years? Rather unlikely. In addition, successful salespeople are always given higher sales targets for bonus achievement. This is why it is so important for IT companies in particular to address the issue of cross-selling and additional services from the very first customer meeting. As systems are merging more and more, e.g. marketing automation systems offer CRM functions and CRM systems offer more and more marketing automation functions, it is important to keep an eye on the further development of the customer’s IT ecosystem. We are seeing that smaller IT companies in particular are not working out a development strategy with customers. The company sells a core IT service with a few additional services and after a certain time, this core service becomes a commodity and the pressure on sales increases. A cross-selling and systematic selling innovation concept is vital, especially for smaller IT companies.
Cross-selling can affect another department in the company
Previous sales approaches speak of the customer and the buying center. Following the logic of the last point, the topic of cross-selling is central for IT companies. Depending on the possibilities, however, it may be that the company’s additional IT offerings are used in a completely different area of the company. For example, a company offers an ERP system and would like to expand this to include marketing automation. While the sale of the ERP system will have primarily affected the COO, finance and product management, the task now is to convince marketing, sales and service. For IT sales, this means gaining an overview of the entire company from the outset (if the company’s own offering offers cross-selling opportunities here). Important information about the respective target person can then be collected at an early stage and used for cross-selling. The shift of IT to the cloud has made it much easier and cheaper to connect different systems, but this can also make cross-selling much more challenging. Every department wants the best system from their point of view.
Conclusion on sales efficiency for IT companies
The general recommendations for sales efficiency, such as customer value and support plan, also apply to IT companies. However, there are special features of sales efficiency for IT companies that are often not taken into account. The four influencing factors presented allow sales efficiency to be improved significantly. This is closely linked to the systematization of the sales approach and the expansion of customer data acquisition. Customer potential analysis in particular is thought of too narrowly and carried out too unsystematically. Improving in this area is becoming a must, as offers in the cloud are increasingly merging.
