Marching Orders 2017: Sell Outside of IT

What should you do to make the most of technology business opportunities in 2017? For this "Marching Orders" series, we put that question to a number of channel luminaries, including top Microsoft channel executives, consultants, Microsoft partners and other regular RCP contributors. This entry comes from Keith Lubner, managing partner at Channel Consulting Corp. and co-founder of Channel EQ.

Our company develops ridiculously good training content and programs for the channel. One of our most popular programs is called Business Guidance Selling. The essence of this course is transforming salespeople to sell outside of their comfort zones and into other areas beyond the IT department.

In 2017, your ability to excel will be determined by your ability to sell to all the other stakeholders within an organization that now have budgets to spend on your products and services.

You can thank the cloud for this shift in the market. More applications and services now exist for more people within an organization. Couple this with the cloud allowing companies to shift spending buckets from CapEx to OpEx and you create more buyers in more departments within more companies. The problem is, for the most part, partner sales teams have been focused on selling to the IT department.

To jump start your transformation and your capabilities, focus on the following in 2017:

• Turn your salespeople into consultants. We mean this figuratively, not literally. Selling to other areas within a business is different. Therefore, your people need to think and act differently. They need to do better pre-call planning. They need to ask better discovery questions. They need to start making recommendations to the prospect on areas for improvements or cost reductions.
  
  
• Because this transformation is not easy (but required in order to make the leap into those other areas), you need to arm your salespeople appropriately. This means training the salespeople on market "pains" and "requirements." This means educating your technical staff to ask more questions about other areas within the business. This means learning more techniques to prospect into the layers of an account.
  
  
• The seller/buyer relationship has changed dramatically, and in order to prosper, you must come to terms with this reality. Buyers know more about your products and services before you ever pick up the phone or walk in the door. You need to differentiate and the only way to do that is to shift your mental approach to the account. Instead of pitching a product, start thinking of presenting a solution. Instead of being reactive to a prospect, become proactive in giving advice. Elevating your abilities will help you rise above the competition and keep you from falling into the control of the buyer.

Think and act differently in 2017, and you will develop more robust pipelines by selling to more people outside of the traditional IT.

Posted by Keith Lubner on December 28, 2016